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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Seven English Cities, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Seven English Cities
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7187]
+This file was first posted on March 24, 2003
+Last Updated: August 22, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tricia Gilbert, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES
+
+By W. D. Howells
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+[Illustration: A VIEW OF MONK BAR]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+   BOOKS OF TRAVEL AND COMMENT BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+
+
+   ROMAN HOLIDAYS............................... net $3.00
+       Traveller’s Edition...................... net  3.00
+
+   CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS, Ill’d...... net  3.00
+       Traveller’s Edition...................... net  3.00
+
+   LONDON FILMS. Illustrated.................... net  2.25
+       Traveller’s Edition...................... net  2.25
+
+   A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN.......................       .50
+
+   MY YEAR IN A LOG CABIN. Illustrated..........       .50
+
+   CRITICISM AND FICTION........................      1.00
+
+   HEROINES OF FICTION. Illustrated............. net  3.75
+
+   IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES..................      1.50
+
+   LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. Ill’d.....      2.50
+
+   LITERATURE AND LIFE.......................... net  2.25
+
+   MODERN ITALIAN POETS. Illustrated............      2.00
+
+   MY LITERARY PASSIONS.........................      1.75
+
+   STOPS OF VARIOUS QUILLS......................      2.50
+        Limited Edition.........................     15.00
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL
+   SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER
+   IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD
+   NINE DAYS’ WONDER IN YORK
+   TWO YORKISH EPISODES
+   A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
+   THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS
+   ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+   LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+   GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS (not available)
+
+
+   A VIEW OF MONK BAR
+   ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LIVERPOOL
+   THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL
+   THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS
+   MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL
+   TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER
+   THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL
+   TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD
+   YORK MINSTER--THE GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND
+   BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER
+   WALMGATE BAR HAS A BARBICAN
+   ST. MARY’S ABBEY
+   CLIFFORD’S TOWER
+   YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER
+   DURHAM CATHEDRAL--NORTHWEST VIEW
+   FINCHALE PRIORY
+   DURHAM CATHEDRAL--ITS MATCHLESS SEAT ON THE BLUFFS OF THE RIVER
+   THE “STUMP” OF ST. BOTOLPH’S CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY
+   THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND QUINCY MARKET-PLACES
+   THE RIVER AT EVENING
+   LIFTING ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM
+   FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY
+   THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH
+   ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS
+   LLANDUDNO--THE CITY AND HARBOR
+   LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME’S NECK
+   THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO
+   CONWAY CASTLE
+   PLAS MAWR
+   A PRESENTATION AT COURT
+   THE ENGLISH HOUSEMAID
+   LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL
+
+
+Why should the proud stomach of American travel, much tossed in the
+transatlantic voyage, so instantly have itself carried from Liverpool
+to any point where trains will convey it? Liverpool is most worthy to be
+seen and known, and no one who looks up from the bacon and eggs of his
+first hotel breakfast after landing, and finds himself confronted by the
+coal-smoked Greek architecture of St. George’s Hall, can deny that it is
+of a singularly noble presence. The city has moments of failing in the
+promise of this classic edifice, but every now and then it reverts to
+it, and reminds the traveller that he is in a great modern metropolis of
+commerce by many other noble edifices.
+
+
+I
+
+Liverpool does not remind him of this so much as the good and true
+Baedeker professes, in the dockside run on the overhead railway (as the
+place unambitiously calls its elevated road); but then, as I noted in my
+account of Southampton, docks have a fancy of taking themselves in,
+and eluding the tourist eye, and even when they “flank the Mersey for a
+distance of 6-7 M.” they do not respond to American curiosity so frankly
+as could be wished. They are like other English things in that, however,
+and it must be said for them that when apparent they are sometimes
+unimpressive. From my own note-book, indeed, I find that I pretended to
+think them “wonderful and almost endless,” and so I dare say they
+are. But they formed only a very perfunctory interest of our day at
+Liverpool, where we had come to meet, not to take, a steamer.
+
+Our run from London, in the heart of June, was very quick and pleasant,
+through a neat country and many tidy towns. In the meadows the elms
+seemed to droop like our own rather than to hold themselves oakenly
+upright like the English; the cattle stood about in the yellow
+buttercups, knee-deep, white American daisies, and red clover, and among
+the sheep we had our choice of shorn and unshorn; they were equally
+abundant. Some of the blossomy May was left yet on the hawthorns, and
+over all the sky hovered, with pale-white clouds in pale-blue spaces
+of air like an inverted lake of bonnyclabber. We stopped the night at
+Chester, and the next evening, in the full daylight of 7.40, we pushed
+on to Liverpool, over lovely levels, with a ground swell like that of
+Kansas plains, under a sunset drying its tears and at last radiantly
+smiling.
+
+
+II
+
+The hotel in Liverpool swarmed and buzzed with busy and murmurous
+American arrivals. One could hardly get at the office window, on account
+of them, to plead for a room. A dense group of our countrywomen were
+buying picture-postals of the rather suave office-ladies, and helplessly
+fawning on them in the inept confidences of American women with all
+persons in official or servile attendance. “Let me stay here,” one of
+them entreated, “because there’s such a draught at the other window.
+May I?” She was a gentle child of forty-five or fifty; and I do not know
+whether she was allowed to stay in the sheltered nook or not, tender
+creature. As she was in every one else’s way there, possibly she was
+harshly driven into the flaw at the other window.
+
+[Illustration: ST. GEORGE’S HALL, LIVERPOOL]
+
+The place was a little America which swelled into a larger with the
+arrivals of the successive steamers, though the soft swift English
+trains bore our co-nationals away as rapidly as they could. Many
+familiar accents remained till the morning, and the breakfast-room was
+full of a nasal resonance which would have made one at home anywhere in
+our East or West. I, who was then vainly trying to be English, escaped
+to the congenial top of the farthest bound tram, and flew, at the rate
+of four miles an hour, to the uttermost suburbs of Liverpool, whither
+no rumor of my native speech could penetrate. It was some balm to my
+wounded pride of country to note how pale and small the average type of
+the local people was. The poorer classes swarmed along a great part
+of the tram-line in side streets of a hard, stony look, and what
+characterized itself to me as a sort of iron squalor seemed to prevail.
+You cannot anywhere have great prosperity without great adversity, just
+as you cannot have day without night, and the more Liverpool evidently
+flourished the more it plainly languished. I found no pleasure in the
+paradox, and I was not overjoyed by the inevitable ugliness of the brick
+villas of the suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed. But
+then, after divers tram changes, came the consolation of beautiful
+riverside beaches, thronged with people who looked gay at that distance,
+and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills, blue, blue.
+
+
+III
+
+At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we
+rejected a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought it too
+thatched and too cottage to be quite true (though I do not now say that
+there were vermin in the straw roof), and accepted the hospitality of
+a pastry-cook’s shop. We felt the more at home with the kind woman
+who kept it because she had a brother at Chicago in the employ of the
+Pinkerton Detective Agency, and had once been in Stratford-on-Avon; this
+doubly satisfied us as cultivated Americans. She had a Welsh name, and
+she testified to a great prevalence of Welsh and Irish in the population
+of Liverpool; besides, she sent us to a church of the Crusaders at
+Little Crosby, and it was no fault of hers that we did not find it. We
+found one of the many old crosses for which Little Crosby is named, and
+this was quite as much as we merited. It stood at the intersection of
+the streets in what seemed the fragment of a village, not yet lost in
+the vast maw of the city, and it calmed all the simple neighborhood,
+so that we sat down at its foot and rested a long, long minute till the
+tram came by and took us back into the loud, hard heart of Liverpool.
+
+I do not mean to blame it, for it was no louder or harder than the
+hearts of other big towns, and it had some alleviation from the many
+young couples who were out together half-holidaying in the unusually
+pleasant Saturday weather. I wish their complexions had been better,
+but you cannot have South-of-England color if you live as far north as
+Liverpool, and all the world knows what the American color is. The young
+couples abounded in the Gallery of Fine Arts, where they frankly looked
+at one another instead of the pictures. The pictures might have been
+better, but then they might have been worse (there being examples of
+Filippo Lippi, Memmi, Holbein, and, above all, the _Dante’s Dream_ of
+Rossetti); and in any case those couples could come and see them when
+they were old men and women; but now they had one another in a moment of
+half-holiday which could not last forever.
+
+In the evening there were not so many lovers at the religious meetings
+before the classic edifice opposite the hotel, where the devotions were
+transacted with the help of a brass-band; but there were many youths
+smoking short pipes, and flitting from one preacher to another, in the
+half-dozen groups. Some preachers were nonconformist, but there was one
+perspiring Anglican priest who labored earnestly with his hearers, and
+who had more of his aspirates in the right place. Many of his hearers
+were in the rags which seem a favorite wear in Liverpool, and I hope his
+words did their poor hearts good.
+
+Slightly apart from the several congregations, I found myself with a
+fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me in an accent
+so unlike my own American that I ventured to answer him in Italian. He
+was indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos Ayres and was
+presently thinking of New York; and we had some friendly discourse
+together concerning the English. His ideas of them were often so
+parallel with my own that I hardly know how to say he thought them
+an improvident people. I owned that they spent much more on state, or
+station, than the Americans; but we neither had any censure for them
+otherwise. He was of that philosophic mind which one is rather apt to
+encounter in the Latin races, and I could well wish for his further
+acquaintance. His talk rapt me to far other and earlier scenes, and I
+seemed to be conversing with him under a Venetian heaven, among objects
+of art more convincing than the equestrian statue of the late Queen, who
+had no special motive I could think of for being shown to her rightly
+loving subjects on horseback. We parted with the expressed hope of
+seeing each other again, and if this should meet his eye and he can
+recall the pale young man, with the dark full beard, who chatted with
+him between the pillars of the Piazzetta, forty years before our actual
+encounter I would be glad of his address.
+
+
+IV
+
+How strange are the uses of travel! There was a time when the mention
+of Liverpool would have conjured up for me nothing but the thought of
+Hawthorne, who spent divers dull consular years there, and has left a
+record of them which I had read, with the wish that it were cheerfuler.
+Yet, now, here on the ground his feet might have trod, and in the very
+smoke he breathed, I did not once think of him. I thought as little of
+that poor Felicia Hemans, whose poetry filled my school-reading years
+with the roar of the wintry sea breaking from the waveless Plymouth Bay
+on the stern and rock-bound coast where the Pilgrim Fathers landed on a
+bowlder measuring eight by ten feet, now fenced in against the predatory
+hammers and chisels of reverent visitors. I knew that Gladstone was born
+at Liverpool, but not Mrs. Oliphant, and the only literary shade I could
+summon from a past vague enough to my ignorance was William Roscoe,
+whose _Life of Leo X._, in the Bohn Library, had been too much for my
+young zeal when my zeal was still young. My other memories of Liverpool
+have been acquired since my visit, and I now recur fondly to the
+picturesque times when King John founded a castle there, to the prouder
+times when Sir Francis Bacon represented it in Parliament; or again to
+the brave days when it resisted Prince Rupert for three weeks, and the
+inglorious epoch when the new city (it was then only some four or five
+hundred years old) began to flourish on the trade in slaves with the
+colonies of the Spanish Main, and on the conjoint and congenial traffic
+in rum, sugar, and tobacco.
+
+[Illustration: THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL]
+
+It will be suspected from these reminiscences that I have been studying
+a page of fine print in Baedeker, and I will not deceive the reader. It
+is true; but it is also true that I had some wonder, altogether my own,
+that so great a city should make so small an appeal to the imagination.
+In this it outdoes almost any metropolis of our own. Even in journalism,
+an intensely modern product, it does not excel; Manchester has its able
+and well-written _Guardian_, but what has Liverpool? Glasgow has its
+Glasgow School of Painting, but again what has Liverpool? It is said
+that not above a million of its people live in it; all the rest, who
+can, escape to Chester, where they perhaps vainly hope to escape the
+Americans. There, intrenched in charming villas behind myrtle hedges,
+they measurably do so; but Americans are very penetrating, and I would
+not be sure that the thickest and highest hedge was invulnerable to
+them. As it is, they probably constitute the best society of Liverpool,
+which the natives have abandoned to them, though they do not constitute
+it permanently, but consecutively. Every Cunarder, every White Star,
+pours out upon a city abandoned by its own good society a flood of
+cultivated Americans, who eddy into its hotels, and then rush out
+of them by every train within twenty-four hours, and often within
+twenty-five minutes. They understand that there are no objects of
+interest in Liverpool; and they are not met at the Customs with
+invitations to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner from the people of rank
+and fashion with whom they have come to associate. These have their
+stately seats in the lovely neighboring country, but they are not at the
+landing-stage, and even the uncultivated American cannot stay for the
+vast bourgeoisie of which Liverpool, like the cities of his own land,
+is composed. Our own cities have a social consciousness, and are each
+sensible of being a centre, with a metropolitan destiny; but the strange
+thing about Liverpool and the like English towns is that they are
+without any social consciousness. Their meek millions are socially
+unborn; they can come into the world only in London, and in their
+prenatal obscurity they remain folded in a dreamless silence, while all
+the commercial and industrial energies rage round them in a gigantic
+maturity.
+
+
+V
+
+The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of entry
+for our human cargoes, indentured apprentices of the beautiful, the
+historical. With the almost immediate transference of the original
+transatlantic steamship interests from Bristol, Liverpool became the
+only place where you could arrive. American lines, long erased from the
+seas, and the Inman line, the Cunard line, the White Star line, and the
+rest, would land you nowhere else. Then heretical steamers began to land
+you at Glasgow; worse schismatics carried you to Southampton; there
+were heterodox craft that touched at Plymouth, and now great swelling
+agnostics bring you to London itself. Still, Liverpool remains the
+greatest port of entry for our probationers, who are bound out to the
+hotels and railroad companies of all Europe till they have morally paid
+back their fare. The superstition that if you go in a Cunarder you can
+sleep on both ears is no longer so exclusive as it once was; yet the
+Cunarder continues an ark of safety for the timid and despairing,
+and the cooking is so much better than it used to be that if in
+contravention of the old Cunard rule against a passenger’s being carried
+overboard you do go down, you may be reasonably sure of having eaten
+something that the wallowing sea-monsters will like in you.
+
+[Illustration: THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS]
+
+I have tried to give some notion of the fond behavior of the arriving
+Americans in the hotels; no art can give the impression of their
+exceeding multitude. Expresses, panting with as much impatience as the
+disciplined English expresses ever suffer themselves to show, await them
+in the stations, which are effectively parts of the great hotels, and
+whir away to London with them as soon as they can drive up from the
+steamer; but many remain to rest, to get the sea out of their heads
+and legs, and to prepare their spirits for adjustment to the novel
+conditions. These the successive trains carry into the heart of the land
+everywhere, these and their baggage, to which they continue attached by
+their very heart-strings, invisibly stretching from their first-class
+corridor compartments to the different luggage-vans. I must say they
+have very tenderly, very perfectly imagined us, all those hotel people
+and railroad folk, and fold us, anxious and bewildered exiles, in a
+reassuring and consoling embrace which leaves all their hands--they are
+Briarean--free for the acceptance of our wide, wild tips. You may trust
+yourself implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not
+trust the head porter who tells you to take the London and Northwestern,
+for then you will have to change four times on the way and at every
+junction personally see that your baggage is unladen and started anew to
+its destination.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER
+
+
+I will suppose the reader not to be going to Oxford, but, in compliance
+with the scheme of this paper, to Manchester, where there is perhaps
+no other reason for his going. He will there, for one thing, find the
+supreme type of the railroad hotel which in England so promptly shelters
+and so kindly soothes the fluttered exile. At Manchester, even more than
+at Liverpool, we are imagined in the immense railroad station hotel,
+which is indeed perhaps superorganized and over-convenienced after an
+American ideal: one does not, for instance, desire a striking, or even
+a ticking, clock in the transom above one’s bedroom door; but the like
+type of hotel is to be found at every great railroad centre or terminal
+in England, and it is never to be found quite bad, though of course it
+is sometimes better and sometimes worse. It is hard to know if it is
+more hotel or more station; perhaps it is a mixture of each which defies
+analysis; but in its well-studied composition you pass, as it were, from
+your car to your room, as from one chamber to another. This is putting
+the fact poetically; but, prosaically, the intervening steps are few at
+the most; and when you have entered your room your train has ceased to
+be. The simple miracle would be impossible in America, where our trains,
+when not shrieking at the tops of their whistles, are backing and
+filling with a wild clangor of their bells, and making a bedlam of their
+stations; but in England they
+
+     “Come like shadows, so depart,”
+
+and make no sound within the vast caravansary where the enchanted
+traveller has changed from them into a world of dreams.
+
+
+I
+
+These hotels are, next to the cathedrals, perhaps the greatest wonder
+of England, and in Manchester the railway hotel is in some ways more
+wonderful than the cathedral, which is not so much planned on our native
+methods. Yet this has the merit, if it is a merit, of antedating our
+Discovery by nearly a century, and pre-historically it is indefinitely
+older. My sole recorded impression of it is that I found it smelling
+strongly of coal-gas, such as comes up the register when your furnace is
+mismanaged; but that is not strange in such a manufacturing centre; and
+it would be paltering with the truth not to own a general sense of the
+beauty and grandeur in it which no English cathedral is without. The
+morning was fitly dim and chill, and one could move about in the vague
+all the more comfortably for the absence of that appeal of thronging
+monuments which harasses and bewilders the visitor in other cathedrals;
+one could really give one’s self up to serious emotion, and not be
+sordidly and rapaciously concerned with objects of interest. Manchester
+has been an episcopal see only some fifty years; before that the
+cathedral was simply T’ Owd Church, and in this character it is still
+venerable, and is none the less so because of the statue of Oliver
+Cromwell which holds the chief place in the open square before it. Call
+it an incongruity, if you will, but that enemy of episcopacy is at least
+not accused of stabling his horses in The Old Church at Manchester, or
+despoiling it of its sacred images and stained glass, and he merits a
+monument there if anywhere.
+
+[Illustration: MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL]
+
+With the constantly passing trams which traverse the square, he is
+undoubtedly more significant of modern Manchester than the episcopacy
+is, and perhaps of that older Manchester which held for him against the
+king, and that yet older Manchester of John Bradford, the first martyr
+of the Reformation to suffer death at the stake in Smithfield. Of the
+still yet older, far older Manchester, which trafficked with the Greeks
+of Marseilles, and later passed under the yoke of Agricola and was
+a Roman military station, and got the name of Maen-ceaster from the
+Saxons, and was duly bedevilled by the Danes and mishandled by the
+Normans, there may be traces in the temperament of the modern town
+which would escape even the scrutiny of the hurried American. Such
+a compatriot was indeed much more bent upon getting a pair of cotton
+socks, like those his own continent wears almost universally in summer,
+but a series of exhaustive visits to all the leading haberdashers in
+Manchester developed the strange fact that there, in the world-heart of
+the cotton-spinning industry, there was no such thing to be found.
+In Manchester there are only woollen socks, heavier or lighter, to be
+bought, and the shopmen smile pityingly if you say, in your strange
+madness, that woollen socks are not for summer wear. Possibly, however,
+it was not summer in Manchester, and we were misled by the almanac.
+Possibly we had been spoiled by three weeks of warm, sunny rain on the
+Welsh coast, and imagined a vain thing in supposing that the end of
+August was not the beginning of November.
+
+
+II
+
+I thought Manchester, however, as it shows itself in its public
+edifices, a most dignified town, with as great beauty as could be
+expected of a place which has always had so much to do besides looking
+after its figure and complexion. The very charming series or system
+of parks, public gardens, and playgrounds, unusual in their number and
+variety, had a sympathetic allure in the gray, cool light, even to the
+spectator passing in a hurried hansom. They have not the unity of
+the Boston or Chicago parkways, and I will own that I had not come to
+Manchester for them. What interested me more were the miles and miles
+of comfortable-looking little brick houses in which, for all I knew, the
+mill-labor dwelt. Very possibly it did not; the mills themselves are
+now nearly all, or mostly, outside of Manchester, and perhaps for this
+reason I did not find the slums, when shown them, very slummy, and I
+saw no such dreadful shapes of rags and dirt as in Liverpool. We passed
+through a quarter of large, old-fashioned mansions, as charming as
+they were unimagined of Manchester; but these could not have been the
+dwellings of the mill-hands, any more than of the mill-owners. The
+mill-owners, at least, live in suburban palaces and villas, which I
+fancy by this time are not
+
+     --“pricking a cockney ear,”
+
+as in the time of Tennyson’s “Maud.”
+
+What wild and whirling insolences, however, the people who have greatly
+made the greatness of England have in all times suffered from their
+poets and novelists, with few exceptions! One need not be a very blind
+devotee of commercialism or industrialism to resent the affronts put
+upon them, when one comes to the scenes of such mighty achievement as
+Liverpool, and Manchester, and Sheffield; but how mildly they seem to
+have taken it all--with what a meek subordination and sufferance! One
+asks one’s self whether the society of such places can be much inferior
+to that of Pittsburg, or Chicago, or St. Louis, which, even from the
+literary attics of New York, we should not exactly allow ourselves to
+spit upon. Practically, I know nothing about society in Manchester, or
+rather, out of it; and I can only say of the general type, of richer or
+poorer, as I saw it in the streets, that it was uncommonly good. Not so
+many women as men were abroad in such weather as we had, and I cannot be
+sure that the sex shows there that superiority physically which it has
+long held morally with us. One learns in the north not to look for the
+beautiful color of the south and west; but in Manchester the average
+faces were intelligent and the figures good.
+
+
+III
+
+With such a journal as the Manchester _Guardian_ still keeping its
+high rank among English newspapers, there cannot be question of the
+journalistic sort of thinking in the place. Of the sort that comes to
+its effect in literature, such as, say, Mrs. Gaskell’s novels, there may
+also still be as much as ever; and I will not hazard my safe ignorance
+in a perilous conjecture. I can only say that of the Unitarianism
+which eventuated in that literature, I heard it had largely turned to
+episcopacy, as Unitarianism has in our own Boston. I must not forget
+that one of our religions, now a dying faith, was invented in Manchester
+by Ann Lee, who brought, through the usual persecutions, Shakerism to
+such spiritual importance as it has now lost in these States. Only those
+who have known the Shakers, with their good lives and gentle ways,
+can regret with me the decline of the celibate communism which their
+foundress imagined in her marital relations with the Lancashire
+blacksmith she left behind her.
+
+I am reminded (or perhaps instructed) by Mr. Hope Moncrieff in Black’s
+excellent _Guide to Manchester_ that before Mrs. Gaskell’s celebrity the
+fitful fame of De Quincey shed a backward gleam upon his native place,
+which can still show the house where he was probably born and the
+grammar-school he certainly ran away from. In my forgetfulness, or my
+ignorance, that Manchester was the mother of this tricksy master-spirit
+of English prose, who was an idol of my youth, I failed to visit either
+house. The renown of Cobden and of Bright is precious to a larger world
+than mine; and the name of the stalwart Quaker friend of man is dear
+to every American who remembers the heroic part he played in our behalf
+during our war for the Union. It is one of the amusing anomalies of
+the British constitution, that the great city from whose political
+fame these names are inseparable should have had no representation in
+Parliament from Cromwell’s time to Victoria’s. Fancy Akron, Ohio, or
+Grand Rapids, Michigan, without a member of Congress!
+
+[Illustration: TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER]
+
+The “Manchester school” of political economy has long since passed
+into reproach if not obloquy with people for whom a byword is a potent
+weapon, and perhaps the easiest they can handle, and I am not myself
+so extreme a _laissez-faireist_ as to have thought of that school with
+pathos in the city of its origin; but I dare say it was a good thing
+in its time. We are only now slowly learning how to apply the opposite
+social principles in behalf of the Man rather than the Master, and
+we have not yet surmounted all the difficulties or dangers of the
+experiment. It is droll how, in a tolerably well-meaning world like
+this, any sort of contempt becomes inclusive, and a whole population
+suffers for the vice, or it may be the virtue, of a very small majority,
+or a very powerful minority. Probably the most liberal and intelligent
+populations of Great Britain are those of Manchester and Birmingham,
+names which have stood for a hard and sordid industrialism, unrelieved
+by noble sympathies and impulses. It is quite possible that a less
+generous spirit than mine would have censured the “Manchester school”
+ for the weather of the place, and found in its cold gray light the
+effect of the Gradgrind philosophy which once wrapt a world of fiction
+in gloom.
+
+
+IV
+
+I can only be sure that the light, what little there was of it, was very
+cold and gray, but it quite sufficed to show the huge lowries, as the
+wagons are called, passing through the streets with the cotton fabrics
+of the place in certain stages of manufacture: perhaps the raw, perhaps
+the finished material. In Manchester itself one sees not much else of
+“the cotton-spinning chorus” which has sent its name so far. The cotton
+is now spun in ten or twenty towns in the nearer or farther neighborhood
+of the great city, as every one but myself and some ninety millions of
+other Americans well know. I had seen something of cotton-mills in our
+Lowell, and I was eager, if not willing, to contrast them with the mills
+of Manchester; but such of these as still remained there were, for my
+luckless moment, inoperative. Personal influences brought me within one
+or two days of their starting up; one almost started up during my brief
+stay; but a great mill, employing perhaps a thousand hands, cannot start
+up for the sake of the impression desired by the aesthetic visitor, and
+I had to come away without mine.
+
+I had to come away without that personal acquaintance with the great
+Manchester ship-canal which I almost equally desired. Coming or going, I
+asked about it, and was told, looking for it from the car window, there,
+_there_ it was! but beyond a glimpse of something very long and very
+straight marking the landscape with lines no more convincing than those
+which science was once decided, and then undecided, to call canals on
+the planet Mars, I had no sight of it. I do not say this was not
+my fault; and I will not pretend that the canal, like the mills of
+Manchester, was not running. I dare say I was not in the right hands,
+but this was not for want of trying to get into them. In the local
+delusion that it was then summer, those whose kindness might have
+befriended the ignorance of the stranger were “away on their holidays”:
+that was exactly the phrase.
+
+When, by a smiling chance, I fell into the right hands and was borne
+to the Cotton Exchange I did not fail of a due sense of the important
+scene, I hope. The building itself, like the other public buildings of
+Manchester, is most dignified, and the great hall of the exchange is
+very noble. I would not, if I could, have repressed a thrill of pride
+in seeing our national colors and emblems equalled with those of Great
+Britain at one end of the room, but these were the only things American
+in the impression left. We made our way through the momently thickening
+groups on the floor, and in the guidance of a member of the exchange
+found a favorable point of observation in the gallery. From this the
+vast space below showed first a moving surface of hats, with few silk
+toppers among them, but a multitude of panamas and other straws. The
+marketing was not carried on with anything like the wild, rangy movement
+of our Stock Exchange, and the floor sent up no such hell-roaring (there
+is no other phrase for it) tumult as rises from the mad but not malign
+demons of that most dramatic representation of perdition. The merchants,
+alike staid, whether old or young, congregated in groups which, dealing
+in a common type of goods, kept the same places till, toward three
+o’clock, they were lost in the mass which covered the floor. Even
+then there was no uproar, no rush or push, no sharp cries or frenzied
+shouting; but from the crowd, which was largely made up of elderly men,
+there rose a sort of surd, rich hum, deepening ever, and never breaking
+into a shriek of torment or derision. It was not histrionic, and yet for
+its commercial importance it was one of the most moving spectacles which
+could offer itself to the eye in the whole world.
+
+[Illustration: THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL]
+
+I cannot pretend to have profited by my visit to that immensely valuable
+deposit of books, bought from the Spencer family at Althorp, and
+dedicated as the Rylands library to the memory of a citizen of
+Manchester. Books in a library, except you have time and free access to
+them, are as baffling as so many bottles in a wine-cellar, which are
+not opened for you, and which if they were would equally go to your head
+without final advantage. I find, therefore, that my sole note upon
+the Rylands Library is the very honest one that it smelt, like the
+cathedral, of coal-gas. The absence of this gas was the least merit
+of the beautiful old Chetham College, with its library dating from the
+seventeenth century, and claiming to have been the first free library in
+England, and doubtless the world. In the cloistered picturesqueness
+of the place, its mediaeval memorials, and its ancient peace, I found
+myself again in those dear Middle Ages which are nowhere quite wanting
+in England, and against which I rubbed off all smirch of the modernity I
+had come to Manchester for.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD
+
+
+If I had waited a little till I had got into the beautiful Derbyshire
+country which lies, or rather rolls, between Manchester and Sheffield,
+I could as easily have got rid of my epoch in the smiling agricultural
+landscape. I do not know just the measure of the Black Country in
+England, or where Sheffield begins to be perhaps the blackest spot in
+it; but I am sure that nothing not surgically clean could be whiter than
+the roads that, almost as soon as we were free of Manchester, began to
+climb the green, thickly wooded hills, and dip into the grassy and leafy
+valleys. In the very heart of the loveliness we found Sheffield most
+nobly posed against a lurid sunset, and clouding the sky, which can
+never be certain of being blue, with the smoke of a thousand towering
+chimneys. From whatever point you have it, the sight is most prodigious,
+but no doubt the subjective sense of the great ducal mansions and
+estates which neighbor the mirky metropolis of steel and iron has its
+part in heightening the dramatic effect.
+
+
+I
+
+The English, with their love of brevity and simplicity, call these proud
+seats the Dukeries, but our affair was not with them, and I shall not
+be able to follow the footmen or butlers or housekeepers who would
+so obligingly show them to the reader in my company. I had a fine
+consciousness of passing some of them on my way into the town, and when
+there of being, however, incongruously, in the midst of them.
+Worksop, more properly than Sheffield, is the plebeian heart of these
+aristocratic homes, or sojourns, which no better advised traveller,
+or less hurried, will fail to see. But I was in Sheffield to see the
+capital of the Black Country in its most characteristic aspects, and I
+thought it felicitously in keeping, after I had dined (less well than I
+could have wished, at the railway hotel which scarcely kept the promise
+made for it by other like hotels) that I should be tempted beyond my
+strength to go and see that colored opera which we had lately sent,
+after its signal success with us, to an even greater prosperity in
+England. _In Dahomey_ is a musical drama not pitched in the highest key,
+but it is a genuine product of our national life, and to witness its
+performance by the colored brethren who invented it, and were giving
+it with great applause in an atmosphere quite undarkened by our racial
+prejudices, was an experience which I would not have missed for many
+Dukeries. The kindly house was not so suffocatingly full that it could
+not find breath for cheers and laughter; but I proudly felt that no
+one there could delight so intelligently as the sole American, in the
+familiar Bowery figures, the blue policemen, the varying darky types,
+which peopled a scene largely laid in Africa. The local New York
+suggestions were often from Mr. Edward Harrigan, and all the more
+genuine for that, but there was a final cake-walk which owed its
+inspiration wholly to the genius of a race destined to greater triumphs
+in music and art, and perhaps to a kindlier civilization than our ideals
+have evolved in yet. It was pleasant to look upon those different shades
+of color, from dead black to creamy blond, in their novel relief against
+an air of ungrudging, of even respectful, appreciation, and I dare say
+the poor things liked it for themselves as much as I liked it for them.
+At a fine moment of the affair I was aware of a figure in evening dress,
+standing near me, and regarding the stage with critical severity:
+a young man, but shrewd and well in hand, who, as the unmistakable
+manager, was, I hope, finally as well satisfied as the other spectators.
+
+
+II
+
+I myself came away entirely satisfied, indeed, but for the lasting pang
+I inflicted upon myself by denying a penny to the ragged wretch who
+superfluously opened the valves of my hansom for me. My explanation to
+my soul was that I had no penny in my pocket, and that it would have
+been folly little short of crime to give so needy a wretch sixpence. But
+would it? Would it have corrupted him, since pauperize him further it
+could not? I advise the reader who finds himself in the like case to
+give the sixpence, and if he cares for the peace of my conscience, to
+make it a shilling; or, come! a half-crown, if he wishes to be truly
+handsome. It is astonishing how these regrets persist; but perhaps in
+this instance I owe the permanence of my pang to those frequent appeals
+to one’s pity which repeated themselves in Sheffield. As I had noted at
+Liverpool I now noted at Sheffield that you cannot have great prosperity
+without having adversity, just as you cannot have heat without cold or
+day without dark. The one substantiates and verifies the other; and I
+perceived that wherever business throve it seemed to be at the cost of
+somebody; though even when business pines it is apparently no better.
+The thing ought to be looked into.
+
+At the moment of my visit to Sheffield, it happened that many works were
+running half-time or no time, and many people were out of work. At one
+place there was a little oblong building between branching streets,
+round which sat a miserable company of Murchers, as I heard them called,
+on long benches under the overhanging roof, who were too obviously, who
+were almost offensively, out of work. Some were old and some young, some
+dull and some fierce, some savage and some imbecile in their looks, and
+they were all stained and greasy and dirty, and looked their apathy or
+their grim despair. Even the men who were coming to or from their work
+at dinner-time looked stunted and lean and pale, with no color of that
+south of England bloom with which they might have favored a stranger.
+Slatternly girls and women abounded, and little babies carried about by
+a little larger babies, and of course kissed on their successive layers
+of dirt. There were also many small boys who, I hope, were not so wicked
+as they were ragged. At noon-time they hung much about the windows of
+cookshops which one would think their sharp hunger would have pierced
+to the steaming and smoking dishes within. The very morning after I had
+denied that man a penny at the theatre door, and was still smarting to
+think I had not given him sixpence, I saw a boy of ten, in the cut-down
+tatters of a man, gloating upon a meat-pie which a cook had cruelly set
+behind the pane in front of him. I took out the sixpence which I ought
+to have given that poor man, and made it a shilling, and put it into
+the boy’s wonderfully dirty palm, and bade him go in and get the pie. He
+looked at me, and he looked at the shilling, and then I suppose he did
+as he was bid. But I ought to say, in justice to myself, that I never
+did anything of the kind again as long as I remained in Sheffield. I
+felt that I owed a duty to the place and must not go about corrupting
+the populace for my selfish pleasure.
+
+
+III
+
+Between our hotel and the main part of the town there yawned a black
+valley, rather nobly bridged, or viaducted, and beyond it in every
+direction the chimneys of the many works thickened in the perspectives.
+It was really like a dead forest, or like thick-set masts of shipping
+in a thronged port; or the vents of tellurian fires, which send up
+their flames by night and their smoke by day. It was splendid, it was
+magnificent, it was insurpassably picturesque. People must have painted
+it often, but if some bravest artist-soul would come, reverently, not
+patronizingly, and portray the sight in its naked ugliness, he would
+create one of the most beautiful masterpieces in the world. On our first
+morning the sun, when it climbed to the upper heavens, found a little
+hole in the dun pall, and shone down through it, and tried to pierce
+through the more immediate cloud above the works; but it could not, and
+it ended by shutting the hole under it, and disappearing.
+
+Beyond the foul avenues thridding the region of the works, and smelling
+of the decay of market-houses, were fine streets of shops and churches,
+and I dare say comely dwellings, with tram-cars ascending and descending
+their hilly slopes. The stores I find noted as splendid, and in my
+pocket-book I say that outside of the market-house, before you got to
+those streets, there are doves and guinea-pigs as well as a raven for
+sale in cages; and the usual horrible English display of flesh meats.
+The trams were one story, like our trolleys, without roof-seats, and
+there were plenty of them; but nothing could keep me, I suppose, till
+I had seen one of the works. Each of these stands in a vast yard, or
+close, by itself, with many buildings, and they are of all sorts; but
+I chose what I thought the most typical, and overcame the reluctance
+of the manager to let me see it. He said I had no idea what tricks were
+played by other makers to find out any new processes and steal them; but
+this was after I had pleaded my innocent trade of novelist, and assured
+him of my congenital incapability of understanding, much less conveying
+from the premises, the image of the simplest and oldest process. Then he
+gave me for guide an intelligent man who was a penknife-maker by trade,
+but was presently out of work, and glad to earn my fee.
+
+My guide proved a most decent, patient, and kindly person, and I hope
+it is no betrayal of confidence to say that he told me the men in
+these multitudinous shops work by the piece. The grinders furnish their
+grindstones and all their tools for making the knives; there is no dry
+grinding, such as used to fill the lungs of the grinders with deadly
+particles of steel and stone, and bring them to an early death; but
+sometimes a stone, which ordinarily lasts six months, will burst and
+drive the grinder through the roof. The blade-makers do their own
+forging and hammering, and it is from first to last apparently all
+hand-work. But it is head-work and heart-work too, and the men who
+wrought at it wrought with such intensity and constancy that they did
+not once look up or round where we paused to look on. I was made to know
+that trade was dull and work slack, and these fellows were lucky fellows
+to have anything to do. Still I did not envy them; and I felt it a
+distinct relief to pass from their shops into the cool, dim crypt which
+was filled with tusks of ivory, in all sizes from those of the
+largest father elephant to those of the babes of the herd; these were
+milk-tusks, I suppose. They get dearer as the elephants get scarcer; and
+that must have been why I paid as much for a penknife in the glittering
+showroom as it would have cost me in New York, with the passage money
+and the duties added. Because of the price, perhaps, I did not think of
+buying the two-thousand-bladed penknife I saw there; but I could never
+have used all the blades, now that we no longer make quill pens. I
+looked fondly at the maker’s name on the knife I did buy, and said that
+the table cutlery of a certain small household which set itself up forty
+years ago had borne the same: but the pleasant salesman did not seem to
+feel the pathos of the fact so much as I.
+
+
+IV
+
+There is not only a vast deal of industry in Sheffield, but there is
+an unusual abundance of history, as there might very well be in a place
+that began life, in the usual English fashion, under the Britons and
+grew into municipal consciousness in the fostering care of the Romans
+and the ruder nurture of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Lords it had of
+the last, and the great line of the Earls of Shrewsbury presently rose
+and led Sheffield men back to battle in France, where the first earl
+fell on the bloody field, and so many of the men died with him in 1453
+that there was not a house in all the region which did not mourn a loss.
+Which of the Roses Sheffield held for, White or Red, I am not sure;
+but we will say that it duly suffered for one or the other; and it is
+certain that the great Cardinal Wolsey rested eighteen days at Sheffield
+Manor just before he went to die at Leicester; and Mary Queen of Scots
+spent fourteen years of sorrowful captivity, sometimes at the Manor
+and sometimes in Sheffield Castle. This hold was taken by the
+Parliamentarians in the Civil War; but the famous industries of the
+place had begun long before; so that Chaucer could say of one of his
+pilgrims,
+
+     “A Sheffield thwytel bare he in his hose.”
+
+Thwytels, or whittles, figured in the broils and stage-plays of
+Elizabethan times, and three gross of them were exported from Liverpool
+in 1589, when the Sheffield penknife was already famed the best in the
+world. Manufactures flourished there apace when England turned to them
+from agriculture, and Sheffield is now a city of four hundred thousand
+or more. Apparently it has been growing radical, as the centres of
+prosperity and adversity always do, and the days of the Chartist
+agitation continued there for ten years, from 1839 till it came as near
+open rebellion as it well could in a plot for an armed uprising. Then
+that cause of the people, like many another, failed, and liberty there,
+as elsewhere in England, was fain to
+
+        “broaden slowly down
+     From precedent to precedent.”
+
+Labor troubles, patient or violent, have followed, as labor troubles
+must, but leisure has always been equal to their pacification, and now
+Sheffield takes its adversity almost as quietly as its prosperity.
+
+[Illustration: TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD]
+
+
+V
+
+We were not there, though, for others’ labor or leisure, which we have
+plenty of at home; but even before I appeased such conscience as I had
+about seeing a type of the works, we went a long drive up out of the
+town to that Manor where the poor, brilliant, baddish Scotch queen was
+imprisoned by her brilliant, baddish English cousin. In any question
+of goodness, there was little to choose between them; both were
+blood-stained liars; but it is difficult being a good woman and a queen
+too, and they only failed where few have triumphed. Mary is the more
+appealing to the fancy because she suffered beyond her deserts,
+but Elizabeth was to be pitied because Mary had made it politically
+imperative for her to kill her. All this we had threshed out many times
+before, and had said that, cat for cat, Mary was the more dangerous
+because she was the more feminine, and Elizabeth the more detestable
+because she was the more masculine in her ferocity. We were therefore
+in the right mood to visit Mary’s prison, and we were both indignant and
+dismayed to find that our driver, called from a mews at a special price
+set upon his intelligence, had never heard of it and did not know where
+it was.
+
+We reported his inability to the head porter, who came out of the hotel
+in a fine flare of sarcasm. “You call yourself a Sheffield man and not
+know where the Old Manor is!” he began, and presently reduced that proud
+ignoramus of a driver to such a willingness to learn that we thought it
+at least safe to set out with him, and so started for the long climb
+up the hills that hold Sheffield in their hollow. When we reached their
+crest, we looked down and back through the clearer air upon as strange
+and grand a sight as could be. It was as if we were looking into the
+crater of a volcano, which was sending up its smoke through a thousand
+vents. All detail of the works and their chimneys was lost in the
+retrospect; one was aware only of a sort of sea of vapor through which
+they loomed and gloomed.
+
+Our ascent was mostly through winding and climbing streets of
+little dirty houses, with frowsy gardens beside them, and the very
+dirtiest-faced children in England playing about them. From time to time
+our driver had to ask his way of the friendly flat-bosomed slatterns,
+with babies in their arms, on their thresholds, or the women tending
+shop, or peddling provisions, who were all kind to him, and assured him
+with varying degrees of confidence that the Old Manor was a bit, or a
+goodish bit, beyond. All at once we came upon the sight of it on an open
+top, hard by what is left of the ruins of the real Manor, where Wolsey
+stayed that little while from death. The relics are broken walls, higher
+here, lower there; with some Tudor fireplaces showing through their
+hollow windows. What we saw in tolerable repair was the tower of the
+Manor, or the lodge, and we drove to it across a field, on a track made
+by farm carts, and presently kept by a dog that showed his teeth in a
+grin not wholly of amusement at our temerity. While we debated whether
+we had not better let the driver get down and knock, a farmer-like man
+came to the door and called the dog off. Then, in a rich North Country
+accent, he welcomed us to his kitchen parlor, where his wife was peeling
+potatoes for their midday dinner, and so led us up the narrow stone
+stairs of the tower to the chambers where Mary miserably passed those
+many long years of captivity.
+
+The rooms were visibly restored in every point where they could have
+needed restoration, but they were not ruthlessly or too insistently
+restored. There was even an antique chair, but when our guide was put on
+his honor as to whether it was one of the original chairs he answered,
+“Well, if people wanted a chair!” He was a rather charmingly quaint,
+humorous person, with that queer conscience, and he did not pretend to
+be moved by the hard inexorable stoniness of the place which had been
+a queen’s prison for many years. One must not judge it too severely,
+though: bowers and prisons of that day looked much alike, and Mary
+Stuart may have felt this a bower, and only hated it because she could
+not get out of it, or anyhow break the relentless hold of that Earl and
+Countess of Shrewsbury whose captive guest she was, though she never
+ceased trying. We went up on the wide flat roof, of lead or stone,
+whither her feet must have so often heavily climbed, and looked out over
+the lovely landscape which she must have abhorred; and the wind that
+blew over it, in late August, was very cold; far colder than the air of
+the prison, or the bower, below.
+
+The place belongs now to the Duke of Norfolk, the great Catholic duke,
+and owes its restoration to his pity and his piety. Our farmer guide
+was himself a Protestant, but he spoke well of the duke, with whom he
+reported himself in such colloquies as, “I says to Dook,” and, “Dook
+says to me.” When he understood that we were Americans he asked after a
+son of his who had gone out to our continent twenty years before. He had
+only heard from him once, and that on the occasion of his being robbed
+of all his money by a roommate. It was in a place called Massatusy; we
+suggested Massachusetts, and he assented that such might be the place;
+and Mary’s prison-house acquired an added pathos.
+
+
+VI
+
+We drove back through the beautiful park, the Duke of Norfolk’s gift to
+Sheffield, which is plentifully provided, like all English towns, with
+public pleasure-grounds. They lie rather outside of it, but within it
+are many and many religious and civic edifices which merit to be seen.
+We chose as chiefest the ancient Parish Church, of Norman origin and
+modern restoration, where we visited the tomb of the Lord and Lady
+Shrewsbury who were Mary Stuart’s jailers; or if they were not, a pair
+of their family were, and it comes to the same thing, emotionally. The
+chapel in which they lie is most beautiful, and the verger had just
+brushed the carpet within the chancel to such immaculate dustlessness
+that he could not bring himself to let us walk over it. He let us walk
+round it, and we saw the chapel as a favor, which we discharged with an
+abnormal tip after severe debate whether a person of this verger’s rich
+respectability and perfect manner would take any tip at all. In the
+event it appeared that he would.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+NINE DAYS’ WONDER IN YORK
+
+
+Perhaps it would be better to come to York somewhat earlier in the year
+than the 2d of September. By that time the English summer has suffered
+often if not severe discouragements. It has really only two months out
+of the year to itself, and even July and August are not always constant
+to it. To be sure, their defection cannot spoil it, but they dispose it
+to the slights of September in a dejection from which there is no rise
+to those coquetries with October known to our own summer. Yet, having
+said so much, I feel bound to add that our nine days in York, from the
+2d to the 12th of September, were more summer than autumn days, some
+wholly, some partly, with hours of sunshine keeping the flowers bright
+which the rain kept fresh. If you walked fast in this sunshine you were
+quite hot, and sometimes in the rain you were uncomfortably warm, or at
+least you were wet. If the mornings demanded a fire in the grate, the
+evenings were so clement that the lamp was sufficient, and the noons
+were very well with neither.
+
+
+I
+
+The day of our arrival in York began bright at Sheffield, where there
+was a man quarrelling so loudly and aimlessly in the station that we
+were glad to get away from him, as well as from the mountains of slag
+surrounding the iron metropolis. The train ran through a pass in these,
+and then we found ourselves in a plain country, and, though the day
+turned gray and misty, there seemed a sort of stored sunshine in the
+fields of wheat which the farmers were harvesting far and near. One has
+heard so much of the decay of the English agriculture that one sees
+what is apparently the contrary with nothing less than astonishment. The
+acreage of these wheat-fields was large, and the yield heavier than I
+could remember to have seen at home. Where the crop had been got in,
+much ploughing for the next year had been done already, and where the
+ploughing was finished the work of sowing by drill was going steadily
+forward, in the faith that such an unprecedented summer as was now
+passing would return another year. At all these pleasant labors, of
+course, the rooks were helping, or at least bossing.
+
+
+II
+
+We expected to stay certainly a week, and perhaps two weeks, in York,
+and our luck with railway hotels had been so smiling elsewhere that we
+had no other mind than to spend the time at the house into which we all
+but stepped from our train. But we had reckoned without our host, as he
+was represented by one of a half-dozen alert young ladies in the office,
+who asked how long we expected to stay, and when we expressed a general
+purpose of staying indefinitely, said that all her rooms were taken
+from the next Monday by people who had engaged them long before for
+the races. I did not choose to betray my ignorance to a woman, but
+I privately asked the head porter what races those were which were
+limiting our proposed sojourn, and I am now afraid he had some
+difficulty in keeping a head porter’s conventional respect for a formal
+superior in answering that we had arrived on the eve of Doncaster Week.
+Then I said, “Oh yes,” and affected the knowledge of Doncaster Week
+which I resolved to acquire by staying somewhere in York till it was
+over.
+
+But as yet, that Friday afternoon, there was no hurry, and, instead of
+setting about a search for lodgings at once, we drove up into the town,
+as soon as we had tea, and visited York Minster while it was still
+the gray afternoon and not yet the gray evening. I thought the hour
+fortunate, and I do not see yet how we could have chosen a better hour
+out of the whole twenty-four, for the inside or the outside of the
+glorious fane, the grandest and beautifulest in all England, as I felt
+then and I feel now. If I were put to the question and were forced to
+say in what its supreme grandeur and beauty lay, I should perhaps say in
+its most ample simplicity. No doubt it is full of detail, but I keep no
+sense of this from that mighty interior, with its tree-like, clustered
+pillars, and its measureless windows, like breadths of stained foliage
+in autumnal woodlands. You want the scale of nature for the Minster at
+York, and I cannot liken it to less than all-out-doors. Some cathedrals,
+like that of Wells, make you think of gardens; but York Minster will not
+be satisfied with less than an autumnal woodland, where the trees stand
+in clumps, with grassy levels about them, and with spacious openings to
+the sky, that let in the colored evening light.
+
+You could not get lost in it, for it was so free of all such
+architectural undergrowth as cumbers the perspectives of some
+cathedrals; besides, the afternoon of our visit there were so many other
+Americans that you could easily have asked your way in your own dialect.
+We loitered over its lengths and breadths, and wondered at its windows,
+which were like the gates of sunrise and sunset for magnitude, and
+lingered in a sumptuous delay from going into the choir, delighting in
+the gray twilight which seemed to gather from the gray walls inward,
+when suddenly what seemed a metallic curtain was dropped with a clash
+and the simultaneous up-flashing of electric bulbs inside it, and we
+were shut out from the sight but not the sound of the service that
+began in the choir. We could not wholly regret the incident, for as
+we recalled the like operation of religion in churches of our Italian
+travel, we were reminded how equally authoritative the Church of England
+and the Church of Home were, and how little they adjust their ceremonial
+to the individual, how largely to the collective worshipper. You could
+come into the Minster of York as into the basilica of St. Mark at Venice
+for a silent prayer amid the religious influences of the place, and be
+conscious of your oneness with your Source, as if there were no
+other one; but when the priesthood called you as one of many to your
+devotions, it was with the same imperative voice in both, and you must
+obey or be cut off from your chance. I suppose it is right; but somehow
+the down-clashing of that screen of the choir in the Minster at York
+seemed to exclude us with reproach, almost with ignominy.
+
+[Illustration: YORK MINSTER--THE GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND]
+
+We did what we could to repair our wounded self respect, and did not lay
+our exclusion up against the Minster itself, which I find that I noted
+as “scatteringly noble outside.” By this I dare say I meant it had not
+that artistic unity of which I brought the impression from the inside.
+They were doing, as they were always doing, every where, with English
+cathedrals, something to one of the towers; but this only enhanced
+its scattering nobleness, for it left that greatly bescaffolded tower
+largely to the imagination, in which it soared sublimer, if anything,
+than its compeer. Most of the streets leading to and from the rather
+insufficient, irregular square where the Minster stands are lanes
+of little houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth, centuries, which
+collectively curved in their line, and not only overhung at their second
+stories, but bulged outward involuntarily from the weakness of age.
+They were all quite habitable, and some much later dwellings immediately
+surrounding the church were the favorite sojourn, apparently, of such
+strangers as could have rooms at the hotels only until the Monday of
+Doncaster Week.
+
+
+III
+
+During those limited days of the week before Doncaster, I was constantly
+coming back to the Minster, which is not the germ of political York, or
+hardly religious York; the brave city was a Romano-British capital and
+a Romano-British episcopal see centuries before the first wooden temple
+was built on the site of the present edifice in 627. I should like to
+make believe that we found traces of that simple church in the crypt of
+the Minster when we went the next morning and were herded through it by
+the tenderest of vergers. Most of our flock were Americans, and we put
+our guide to such question in matters of imagination and information
+as the patience of a less amiable shepherd would not have borne. Many a
+tale, true or o’ertrue, our verger had, which he told with unction; when
+he ascended with us to the body of the church, and said that the stained
+glass of the gigantic windows suffered from the depredations of the
+mistaken birds which pecked holes in the joints of their panes, I felt
+that I had full measure from him, pressed down and running over. I do
+not remember why he said the birds should have done this, but it seems
+probable that they took the mellow colors of the glass for those of ripe
+fruits.
+
+For myself, I could not get enough of those windows, in another sort
+of famine which ought at this time to have been sated. I was forever
+wondering at their grandeur outside and their glory inside. I was glad
+to lose my way about the town, for if I kept walking I was sure, sooner
+or later, to bring up at the Minster; but the last evening of our stay
+I made a purposed pilgrimage to it for a final emotion. It was the
+clearest evening we had in York, and at half-past six the sun was
+setting in a transparent sky, which somehow it did not flush with any of
+those glaring reds which the vulgarer sorts of sunsets are fond of, but
+bathed the air in a delicate suffusion of daffodil light, just tinged
+with violet. This was the best medium to see the past of the Minster in,
+and I can see it there now, if I did not then. I followed, or I follow,
+its veracious history back to the beginning of the seventh century,
+whence you can look back further still to the earliest Christian temples
+where the Romans worshipped with the Britons, whom they had enslaved
+and converted. But it was not till 627 that the little wooden chapel was
+built on the site of the Minster, to house the rite of the Northumbrian
+King Eadwine’s baptism. He felt so happy in his new faith that he
+replaced the wooden structure with stone. In the next century it was
+burned, but rebuilt by another pious prince, and probably repaired by
+yet another after the Danes took the city a hundred years later. It
+was then in a good state to be destroyed by that devout William the
+Conqueror, who came to take the Saxon world in its sins of guttling
+and guzzling. The first Norman archbishop reconstructed or restored
+the church, and then it began to rise and to spread in glory--nave,
+transepts, and choir, and pillars and towers, Norman and Early English,
+and Perpendicular and Decorated--till it found itself at last what the
+American tourist sees it to-day. It suffered from two great fires in
+the nineteenth century, the first set by a lunatic who had the fancy of
+seeing it burn, but who had only the satisfaction of destroying part of
+the roof.
+
+It was never richly painted, but the color wanting in the walls and
+fretted vault was more than compensated by the mellowed splendors of
+the matchless windows. It was, indeed, fit to be the home of much more
+secular history than can be associated with it; but not till the end
+of the thirteenth century had the Minster a patron of its own, when St.
+William was canonized, and exercised his office, whatever it was, for
+two brief centuries. Then the Cromwell of Henry VIII. took possession
+of it in behalf of the crown, and the saint’s charge was practically
+abolished. He was even deprived of his head, for the relic was encased
+in gold and jewels, and was therefore worth the king’s having, who was
+most a friend of the reformed religion when it paid best. The later
+Cromwell, who beat a later king hard by at Marston Moor, must have
+somehow desecrated the Minster, though there is no record of any such
+fact. A more authentic monument of the religious difficulties of the
+times is the pastoral staff, bearing the arms of Catharine of Braganza,
+the poor little wife of Charles II., which was snatched from a Roman
+Catholic bishop when, to the high offence of Protestant piety, he was
+heading a procession in York in 1688. The verger showing us through the
+Minster was a good Protestant, but he held it bad taste in a predecessor
+of his, who when leading about a Catholic party of sight-seers took the
+captive staff from its place and shook it in their faces, saying, “Don’t
+you wish you had it?”
+
+
+IV
+
+There is no telling to what lengths true religion, may rightly not go. I
+rather prize the incident as the sole fact concerning the Minster which
+I could make sure of even after repeated visits, and if I am indebted
+for my associations with it, long after the event, to Dr. Raine’s
+scholarly and interesting sketch of York history, there is no reason
+why the better-informed reader should not accompany me in my last visit
+fully equipped. I walked slowly all round the structure, and fancied
+that I got a new sense of grandeur in the effect of the east window,
+which was, at any rate, more impressive than the north window. It was
+a long walk, almost the measure of such a walk as one should take after
+supper for one’s health, and it had such incidents as many pauses for
+staring up at the many restorations going on. From point to point the
+incomparable Perpendicular Gothic carried the eye to the old gargoyles
+of the caves and towers waiting to be replaced by the new gargoyles,
+which lay in open-mouthed grimacing in the grass at the bases of the
+church. While I stood noting both, and thinking the chances were that I
+should never look on York Minster again, and feeling the luxurious pang
+of it, a verger in a skull-cap was so good as to come to a side door and
+parley long and pleasantly with a policeman. The simple local life went
+on around; people going to or from supper passed me; kind, vulgar
+noises came from the little houses bulging over the narrow, neighboring
+streets; there seemed to be the stamping of horses in a stable, and
+there was certainly the misaspirated talk about them. I could not have
+asked better material for the humble emotions I love; and I was more
+than content on my way home to find myself one of the congregation
+at the loud devotions of a detachment of the Salvation Army. After a
+battering of drums and a clashing of cymbals and a shouting of hymns,
+the worship settled to the prayer of a weak brother, who was so long in
+supplication that the head exhorter covered a yawn with his hand, and at
+the first sign of relenting in the supplicant bade the drums and cymbals
+strike up. Then, after a hymn, a sister, such a very plain, elderly
+sister, with hardly a tooth or an aitch in her head, began to relate her
+religious history. It appeared that she had been a much greater sinner
+than she looked, and that the mercy shown her had been proportionate.
+She was vain both of her sins and mercies, poor soul, and in her scrimp
+figure, with its ill-fitting uniform, Heaven knows how long she went on.
+I was distracted by a clergyman passing on the outside of the ring of
+listening women and children, and looking, I chose to think, somewhat
+sourly askance at the distasteful ceremonial. I wished to stop him,
+on his way to the Minster, if that was his way, and tell him that so
+Christianity must have begun, and so the latest form of it must
+always begin and work round after ages and ages to the beauty and
+respectability his own ritual has. But I now believe this would have
+been the greatest impertinence and hypocrisy, for I myself found the
+performance before us as tasteless and tawdry as he could possibly have
+done. He was going toward the Minster, and it would make him forget it;
+but I was going away from it, perhaps, for the last time, and this loud
+side-show of religion would make me forget the Minster.
+
+
+V
+
+Our railway hotel lay a little way out of the town, and after a day’s
+sight-seeing we were to meet or mingle with troops of wholesome-looking
+workmen whose sturdiness and brightness were a consolation after
+the pale debility of labor’s looks in Sheffield. From the
+chocolate-factories or the railroad-shops, which are the chief
+industries of York, they would be crossing the bridge of the Ouse, the
+famous stream on which the Romans had their town, and which suggested to
+the Anglicans to call their Eboracum Eurewic--a town on a river. In due
+time the Danes modified this name to Yerik, and so we came honestly by
+the name of our own New York, called after the old York, as soon as the
+English had robbed the Dutch of it, and the King of England had given
+the province to his brother the Duke of York. Both cities are still
+towns on rivers, but the Ouse is no more an image or forecast of the
+Hudson than Old York is of New York. For that reason, the bridge over
+it is not to be compared to our Brooklyn Bridge, or even to any bridge
+which is yet to span the Hudson. The difference is so greatly in our
+favor that we may well yield our city’s mother the primacy in her city
+wall. We have ourselves as yet no Plantagenet wall, and we have not yet
+got a mediaeval gate through which the traveller passes in returning
+from the Flatiron Building to his hotel in the Grand Central Station.
+
+We do not begin to have such a hoar antiquity as is articulate in the
+mother city, speaking with muted voices from the innumerable monuments
+which the earth has yielded from the site of our hotel and its adjacent
+railway station. All underground York is doubtless fuller of Home than
+even Bath is; and it has happened that her civilization was much more
+largely dug up here than elsewhere when the foundations of the spreading
+edifices were laid. The relics are mainly the witnesses of pagan Rome,
+but Christianity politically began in York, as it has politically ended
+in New York, and doubtless some soldiers of the Sixth Legion and many of
+the British slaves were religiously Christians in the ancient metropolis
+before Constantine was elected emperor there.
+
+I have been in many places where history is hospitably at home and is
+not merely an unwilling guest, as in our unmemoried land. Florence is
+very well, Venice is not so bad, Naples has her long thoughts, and Milan
+is mediaeval-minded, not to speak of Genoa, or Marseilles, or Paris, or
+those romantic German towns where the legends, if not the facts, abound;
+but, after all, for my pleasure in the past, I could not choose any
+place before York. You need not be so very definite in your knowledge.
+The event of Constantine’s presence and election is so spacious as to
+leave no room for particulars in the imagination; and you are so rich in
+it that you will even reject them from your thoughts, as you sit in
+the close-cropped flowery lawn of your hotel garden (try to imagine a
+railroad hotel garden in _New_ York!) on the sunniest of the afternoons
+before you are turned out for Doncaster Week, and, while you watch
+a little adventurous American boy climbing over a pile of rock-work,
+realize the most august, the most important fact in the story of the
+race as native to the very air you are breathing! Where you sit you are
+in full view of the Minster, which is to say in view of something like
+the towers and battlements of the celestial city. Or if you wake
+very early on a morning still nearer the fatal Doncaster Week of your
+impending banishment, and look out of your lofty windows at the sunrise
+reddening the level bars of cloud behind the Minster, you shall find it
+bulked up against the pearl-gray masses of the sunny mist which hangs
+in all the intervening trees, and solidifies them in unbroken masses of
+foliage. All round your hotel spreads a gridiron of railroad, yet such
+is the force of the English genius for quiet that you hear no clatter of
+trains; the expresses whir in and out of the station with not more noise
+than humming-birds; and amid this peace the past has some chance with
+modernity. The Britons dwell, unmolested by our latter-day clamor, in
+their wattled huts and dugouts; the Romans come and make them slaves and
+then Christians, and after three or four hundred years send word from
+the Tiber to the Ouse that they can stay no longer, and so leave them
+naked to their enemies, the Picts and Scots and Saxons and Angles; and
+in due course come the ravaging and burning Danes; and in due course
+still, the murdering and plundering and scorning Normans. But all so
+quietly, like the humming-bird-like expresses, with a kind of railway
+celerity in the foreshortened retrospect; and after the Normans have
+crushed themselves down into the mass of the vanquished, and formed the
+English out of the blend, there follow the many wars of the successions,
+of the Roses, of the Stuarts, with all the intermediate insurrections
+and rebellions. In the splendid Histories of Shakespeare, which are
+full of York, the imagination visits and revisits the place, and you are
+entreated by mouth of one of his princely personages,
+
+     “I pray you let us satisfy our eyes
+      With the memorials and things of fame,
+      That do renown this city,”
+
+where his Henrys and Richards and Margarets and Edwards and Eleanors
+abide still and shall forever abide while the English speech lasts.
+
+[Illustration: BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER]
+
+
+VI
+
+Something of all this I knew, and more pretended, with a mounting
+indignation at the fast-coming Doncaster Week which was to turn us out
+of our hotel. We began our search for other lodgings with what seemed to
+be increasing failure. The failure had consolation in it so far as the
+sweet regret of people whose apartments were taken could console. They
+would have taken us at other hotels for double the usual price, but,
+when we showed ourselves willing to pay, it proved that they had
+no rooms at any price. From house to house, then, we went, at first
+vaingloriously, in the spaces about the Minster, and then meekly into
+any side street, wherever the legend of Apartments showed itself in a
+transom. At last, the second day, after being denied at seven successive
+houses, we found quite the refuge we wanted in the Bootham, which means
+very much more than the ignorant reader can imagine. Our upper rooms
+looked on a pretty grassy garden space behind, where there was sun when
+there was sun, and in front on the fine old brick dwellings of a most
+personable street, with a sentiment of bygone fashion. At the upper end
+of it was a famous city gate--Bootham Bar, namely--with a practicable
+portcullis, which we verified at an early moment by going up into “the
+chamber over the gate,” where it was once worked, and whence its lower
+beam, set thick with savage spikes, was dropped. Outside the gate there
+was a sign in the wall saying that guards were to be had there to guide
+travellers through the Forest of Galtres beyond Bootham, and keep them
+from the wolves. Now woods and wolves and guards are all gone, and
+Bootham Bar is never closed.
+
+The upper room is a passageway for people who are walking round the town
+on the Plantagenet wall, and one morning we took this walk in sunshine
+that befitted the Sabbath. Half the children of York seemed to be taking
+it, too, with their good parents, who had stayed away from church to
+give them this pleasure, the fathers putting on their frock-coats and
+top-hats, which are worn on no other days in the provincial cities of
+England. For a Plantagenet wall, that of York is in excellent repair,
+and it is very clean, so that the children could not spoil their Sunday
+best by clambering on the parapet, and trying to fall over it. There
+was no parapet on the other side, and they could have fallen over that
+without trouble; but it would not have served the same purpose; for
+under the parapet there were the most alluringly ragged little boys,
+with untidy goats and delightfully dirty geese. There was no trace of a
+moat outside the wall, where pleasant cottages pressed close to it
+with their gardens full of bright flowers. At one point there were
+far-spreading sheep and cattle pens, where there is a weekly market, and
+at another the old Norman castle which cruel Conqueror William built to
+hold the city, and which has suffered change, not unpicturesque,
+into prisons for unluckier criminals, and the Assize Courts for their
+condemnation. From time to time the wall left off, and then we got down,
+perforce, and walked to the next piece of it. In these pieces we
+made the most of the old gates, especially Walmgate Bar, which has a
+barbican. I should be at a loss to say why the barbican should have
+commended it so; perhaps it was because we there realized, for the first
+time, what a barbican was; I doubt if the reader knows, now. Otherwise,
+I should have preferred Monk Bar or Micklegate Bar, as being more like
+those I was used to in the theatre. But we came back gladly to Bootham
+Bar, holding that a portcullis was equal any day to a barbican, and
+feeling as if we had got home in the more familiar neighborhood.
+
+There were small shops in the Bootham, thread-and-needle stores,
+newspaper stores, and provision stores mainly, which I affected, and
+there was one united florist’s and fruiterer’s which I particularly
+liked because of the conversability of the proprietor. He was a stout
+man, of a vinous complexion, with what I should call here, where our
+speech is mostly uncouth, an educated accent, though with few and
+wandering aspirates in it. Him I visited every morning to buy for my
+breakfast one of those Spanish melons which they have everywhere in
+England, and which put our native cantaloupes to shame; and we always
+fell into a little talk over our transaction of fourpence or sixpence,
+as the case might be. After I had confided that I was an American, he
+said one day, “Ah, the Americans are clever people.” Then he added,
+“I hope you won’t mind my saying it, sir, but I think their ladies are
+rather harder than our English ladies, sir.”
+
+“Yes,” I eagerly assented. “How do you mean? Sharper? Keener?”
+
+“Well, not just that, sir.”
+
+“More practical? More business-like?” I pursued.
+
+“Well, I shouldn’t like to say that, sir. But--they seem rather harder,
+sir; at least, judging from what I see of them in York, sir. Rather
+harder, sir.”
+
+We remained not the less friends with that mystery between us; and I
+bought my last melon of him on my last morning, when the early September
+had turned somewhat sharply chill. That turn made me ask what the winter
+was in York, and he boasted it very cold, with ice and snow aplenty,
+and degrees of frost much like our own. But apparently those York women
+resisted it and remained of a tenderness which contrasted to their
+advantage with the summer hardness of our women.
+
+
+VII
+
+It was a pleasure, which I should be glad to share with the reader, to
+lose one’s self in the streets of York. They were all kinds of streets
+except straight, and they seemed not to go anywhere except for the
+joke of bringing the wayfarer unexpectedly back to, or near, his
+starting-point and far from his goal. The blame of their vagariousness,
+if it was a fault, is put upon the Danes, who found York when they
+captured it very rectangular, for so the Romans built it, and so the
+Angles kept it; but nothing would serve the Danes but to crook its
+streets and call them gates, so that the real gates of the city have to
+be called bars, or else the stranger might take them for streets. If he
+asked another wayfarer, he could sometimes baffle the streets, and get
+to the point he aimed at, but, whether he did or not, he could always
+amuse himself in them; they would take a friendly interest in him,
+and show him the old houses and churches which the American stranger
+prefers. They abound in the poorer sorts of buildings, of course, just
+as they do in the poorer sorts of people, but in their simpler courts
+and squares and expanses they have often dignified mansions of that
+Georgian architecture which seems the last word in its way, and which is
+known here in our older edifices as there in their newer. Some of them
+are said to have “richly carved ceilings, wainscoted, panelled rooms,
+chimneypieces with paintings framed in the over-mantel, dentilled
+cornices, and pedimented doors,” and I could well believe it, as I
+passed them with an envious heart. There were gardens behind these
+mansions which hung their trees over the spiked coping of their
+high-shouldered walls and gates, and sequestered I know not what damp
+social events in their flowery and leafy bounds.
+
+[Illustration: WALMGATE BAR HAS A BARBICAN]
+
+At times I distinctly wished to know something of the life of York, but
+I was not in the way of it. The nearest to an acquaintance I had there,
+besides my critical fruiterer, was the actor whose name I recognized on
+his bills as that of a brave youth who had once dramatized a novel of
+mine, and all too briefly played the piece, and who was now to come
+to York for a week of Shakespeare. Perhaps I could not forgive him the
+recrudescence; at any rate, I did not try to see him, and there was no
+other social chance for me, except as I could buy in for a few glimpses
+at the tidy confectioners’, where persons of civil condition resorted
+for afternoon tea. Even to these one could not speak, and I could only
+do my best in a little mercenary conversation with the bookseller about
+York histories. The bookstores were not on our scale, and generally the
+shops in York were not of the modern department type, but were perhaps
+the pleasanter for that reason.
+
+In my earlier wanderings I made the acquaintance of a most agreeable
+market-place, stretching the length of two squares, which on a Saturday
+afternoon I found filled with every manner of bank and booth and
+canopied counter, three deep, and humming pleasantly with traffic in
+everything one could eat, drink, wear, or read; there seemed as many
+book-stalls as fruit-stalls. What I noted equally with the prettiness
+of the abounding flowers was the mild kindness of the market-people’s
+manners and their extreme anxiety to state exactly the quality of the
+things they had for sale. They seemed incapable of deceit, but I do
+not say they really were so. My own transactions were confined to the
+purchase of some golden-gage plums, and I advise the reader rather to
+buy greengages; the other plums practised the deception in their looks
+which their venders abhorred.
+
+
+VIII
+
+I wandered in a perfectly contemporary mood through the long ranks and
+lanes of the marketplace, and did not know till afterward that at one
+end of it, called the Pavement, the public executions used to take place
+for those great or small occasions which brought folks to the block or
+scaffold in the past. I had later some ado to verify the dismal fact
+from a cluster of people before a tavern who seemed to be taking bets
+for the Doncaster Week, and I could hardly keep them from booking me
+for this horse or that when I merely wanted to know whether it was on a
+certain spot the Earl of Northumberland had his head cut off for leading
+a rising against Henry IV.; or some such execution.
+
+What riches of story has not York to browbeat withal the storyless
+New-Yorker who visits her! That Henry IV. was he whom I had lately seen
+triumphing near Shrewsbury in the final battle of the Roses, where the
+Red was so bloodily set above the White; and it was his poetic fancy
+to have Northumberland, when he bade him come to York, pass through the
+gateway on which the head of his son, Hotspur Harry, was festering. No
+wonder the earl led a rising against his liege, who had first mercifully
+meant to imprison him for life, and then more mercifully pardoned him.
+But there seems to have been fighting up and down the centuries from the
+beginning, in York, interspersed with praying and wedding and feasting.
+After the citizens drove out Conqueror William’s garrison, and Earl
+Waltheof provided against the Normans’ return by standing at the castle
+gate and chopping their heads off with his battle-axe as they came
+forth, William efficaciously devastated the city and the country as far
+as Durham. His son William gave it a church, and that “worthy peer,”
+ King Stephen, a hospital. In his time the archbishop and barons of York
+beat the Scotch hard by, and the next Scotch king had to do homage to
+Henry II. at York for his kingdom. Henry III. married his sister at York
+to one Scotch king and his daughter to that king’s successor. Edward I.
+and his queen Eleanor honored with their presence the translation of St.
+William’s bones to the Minster; Edward II. retreated from his defeat at
+Bannockburn to York, and Edward III. was often there for a king’s
+varied occasions of fighting and feasting. Weak Henry VI. and his wilful
+Margaret, after their defeat at Towton by Edward IV., escaped from the
+city just in time, and Edward entered York under his own father’s head
+on Micklegate Bar. Richard III. was welcomed there before his rout and
+death at Bosworth, and was truly mourned by the citizens. Henry VII.
+wedded Elizabeth, the “White Rose of York,” and afterward visited her
+city; Mary, Queen of Scots, was once in hiding there, and her uncouth
+son stayed two nights in York on his way to be crowned James I. in
+London. His son, Charles I., was there early in his reign, and touched
+many for the king’s evil; later, he was there again, but could not cure
+the sort of king’s evil which raged past all magic in the defeat of his
+followers at Marston Moor by Cromwell. The city yielded to the Puritans,
+whose temperament had already rather characterized it. James II., as
+Duke of York, made it his brief sojourn; “proud Cumberland,” returning
+from Culloden after the defeat of the Pretender, visited the city
+and received its freedom for destroying the last hope of the Stuarts;
+perhaps the twenty-two rebels who were then put to death in York were
+executed in the very square where those wicked men thought I was wanting
+to play the horses. The reigning family has paid divers visits to the
+ancient metropolis, which was the capital of Britain before London was
+heard of. The old prophecy of her ultimate primacy must make time if
+it is to fulfil itself and increase York’s seventy-two thousand beyond
+London’s six million.
+
+
+IX
+
+I should be at a loss to say why its English memories haunted my York
+less than the Roman associations of the place. They form, however,
+rather a clutter of incidents, whereas the few spreading facts of
+Hadrian’s stay, the deaths of Severus and Constantius, and the election
+of Constantine, his son, enlarge themselves to the atmospheric compass
+of the place, but leave a roominess in which the fancy may more
+commodiously orb about. I was on terms of more neighborly intimacy
+with the poor Punic emperor than with any one else in York, doubtless
+because, when he fell sick, he visited the temple of Bellona near
+Bootham Bar, and paid his devotions unmolested, let us hope, by any
+prevision of the misbehavior of his son Caracalla (whose baths I had
+long ago visited at Rome) in killing his other son Geta. Everywhere I
+could be an early Christian, in company with Constantine, in whom the
+instinct of political Christianity must have begun to stir as soon as he
+was chosen emperor. But I dare say I heard the muted tramp of the Sixth
+Legion about the Yorkish streets above all other martial sounds because
+I stayed as long as Doncaster Week would let me in the railway hotel,
+which so many of their bones made room for when the foundations of it
+were laid, with those of the adherent station. Their bones seem to
+have been left there, after the disturbance, but their sepulchres were
+respectfully transferred to the museum of the Philosophical Society, in
+the grounds where the ruins of St. Mary’s Abbey rise like fragments
+of pensive music or romantic verse, inviting the moonlight and the
+nightingale, but, wanting these, make shift with the noonday and the
+babies in perambulators neglected by nurse-girls reading novels.
+
+[Illustration: ST. MARY’S ABBEY]
+
+The babies and the nurses are not allowed in the museum of antiquities,
+which is richer in Roman remains than any that one sees outside of
+Italy. There are floors of mosaic, large and perfect, taken from the
+villas which people are always digging up in the neighborhood of York,
+and, from the graves uncovered in the railway excavations, coffins of
+lead and stone for civilians, and of rude tiles for the soldiers of the
+Sixth Legion; the slaves were cast into burial-pits of tens and twenties
+and left to indiscriminate decay till they should be raised in the
+universal incorruption. Probably the slaves were the earliest Christians
+at York; certainly the monuments are pagan, as the inmates of the tombs
+must have been. Some of the monuments bear inscriptions from loving
+wives and husbands to the partners they have lost, and some of the stone
+coffins are those of children. It is all infinitely touching, and after
+two thousand years the heart aches for the fathers and mothers who laid
+their little ones away in these hard cradles for their last sleep.
+Faith changes, but constant death remains the same, and life is not very
+different in any age, when it comes to the end. The Roman exiles who had
+come so far to hold my British ancestors in subjection to their alien
+rule seemed essentially not only of the same make as me, but the
+same civilization. Their votive altars and inscriptions to other gods
+expressed a human piety of like anxiety and helplessness with ours, and
+called to a like irresponsive sky. A hundred witnesses of their mortal
+state--jars and vases and simple household utensils--fill the shelves of
+the museum; but the most awful, the most beautiful appeal of the past is
+in that mass of dark auburn hair which is kept here in a special urn and
+uncovered for your supreme emotion. It is equally conjectured to be the
+hair of a Roman lady or of a British princess, but is of a young girl
+certainly, dressed twenty centuries ago for the tomb in which it was
+found, and still faintly lucent with the fashionable unguent of the day,
+and kept in form by pins of jet. One thinks of the little, slender hands
+that used to put them there, and of the eyes that confronted themselves
+in the silver mirror under the warm shadow that the red-gold mass
+cast upon the white forehead. This sanctuary of the past was the most
+interesting place in that most interesting city of York, and the day of
+our first visit a princess of New York sat reading a book in the midst
+of it, waiting for the rain to be over, which was waiting for her to
+come out and then begin again. We knew her from having seen her at the
+station in relation to some trunks bearing her initials and those of
+her native city; and she could be about the age of the York princess or
+young Roman lady whose hair was kept in the urn hard by.
+
+
+X
+
+There is in York a little, old, old church, whose dear and reverend
+name I have almost forgotten, if ever I knew it, but I think it is Holy
+Trinity Goodramgate, which divides the heart of my adoration with the
+Minster. We came to it quite by accident, one of our sad September
+afternoons, after we had been visiting the Guildhall, Venetianly
+overhanging the canal calm of the Ouse, and very worthy to be seen for
+its York histories in stained glass. The custodian had surprised us and
+the gentlemen of the committee by taking us into the room where they
+were investigating the claims of the registered voters to the suffrage;
+and so, much entertained and instructed, we issued forth, and, passing
+by the church in which Guy Fawkes was baptized, only too ineffectually,
+we came quite unexpectedly upon Holy Trinity Goodramgate, if that and
+not another is indeed its name.
+
+It stands sequestered in a little leafy and grassy space of its own,
+with a wall hardly overlooked on one side by low stone cottages, the
+immemorial homes of rheumatism and influenza. The church had the air
+of not knowing that it is of Perpendicular and Decorated Gothic, with
+a square, high-shouldered tower, as it bulks up to a very humble
+height from the turf to the boughs overhead, or that it has a nice
+girl sketching its doorway, where a few especially favored weddings and
+funerals may enter. It is open once a year for service, and when the
+tourist will, or can, for the sight of the time-mellowed, beautiful
+stained glass of its eastward window. The oaken pews are square and
+high-shouldered, like the low church tower; and, without, the soft
+yellow sandstone is crumbling away from the window traceries. The church
+did not look as if it felt itself a thousand years old, and perhaps it
+is not; but I never was in a place where I seemed so like a ghost of
+that antiquity. I had a sense of haunting it, in the inner twilight and
+the outer sunlight, where a tender wind was stirring the leaves of its
+embowering trees and scattering them on the graves of my eleventh and
+twelfth century contemporaries.
+
+
+XI
+
+We chose the sunniest morning we could for our visit to Clifford’s
+Tower, which remains witness of the Norman castle the Conqueror built
+and rebuilt to keep the Danish-Anglian-Roman-British town in awe. But
+the tower was no part of the original castle, and only testifies of it
+by hearsay. That was built by Roger de Clifford, who suffered death with
+his party chief, the Earl of Lancaster, when Edward of York took the
+city, and it is mainly memorable as the refuge of the Jews whom the
+Christians had harried out of their homes. They had grown in numbers and
+riches, when the Jew-hate of 1190 broke out in England, as from time
+to time the Jew-hate breaks out in Russia now, to much the same cruel
+effect. They were followed and besieged in the castle, and, seeing that
+they must be captured, they set fire to the place, and five hundred slew
+themselves. Some that promised to be Christians came out and were killed
+by their brethren in Christ. In New York the Christians have grown
+milder, and now they only keep the Jews out of their clubs and their
+homes.
+
+[Illustration: CLIFFORD’S TOWER]
+
+The Clifford Tower leans very much to one side, so that as you ascend it
+for the magnificent view from the top you have to incline yourself the
+other way, as you do in the Tower of Pisa, to help it keep its balance.
+The morning of our visit, so gay in its forgetfulness of the tragical
+past, we found the place in charge of an old soldier, an Irishman who
+had learned, as custodian, a professional compassion for those poor Jews
+of nine hundred years ago, and, being moved by our confession of our
+nationality, owned to three “nevvies” in New Haven. So small is the
+world and so closely knit in the ties of a common humanity and a common
+citizenship, native and adoptive!
+
+The country around York looked so beautiful from Clifford’s Tower that
+we would not be satisfied till we had seen it closer, and we chose a
+bright, cool September afternoon for our drive out of the town and over
+the breezy, high levels which surround it. The first British capital
+could hardly have been more nobly placed, and one could not help
+grieving that the Ouse should have indolently lost York that early
+dignity by letting its channel fill up with silt and spoil its
+navigation. The Thames managed better for York’s upstart rival London,
+and yet the Ouse is not destitute of sea or river craft. These were of
+both steam and sail, and I myself have witnessed the energy with which
+the reluctance of the indolent stream is sometimes overcome. I do not
+suppose that anywhere else, when the wind is low, is a vessel madly
+hurled through the water at a mile an hour by means of a rope tied
+to its mast and pulled by a fatherly old horse under the intermittent
+drivership of two boys whom he could hardly keep to the work. I loved
+the banks of a stream where one could see such a triumph of man over
+nature, and where nature herself was so captivating. All that grassy
+and shady neighborhood seemed a public promenade, where on a Sunday one
+could see the lower middle classes in their best and brightest, and
+it had for all its own the endearing and bewitching name of Ings. Why
+cannot we have Ings by the Hudson side?
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TWO YORKISH EPISODES
+
+
+Certainly I had not come to York, as certainly I would not have gone
+anywhere, for battle-fields, but becoming gradually sensible in that
+city that the battle of Marston Moor was fought a few miles away, and
+my enemy Charles I. put to one of his worst defeats there, I bought a
+third-class ticket and ran out to the place one day for whatever emotion
+awaited me there.
+
+
+I
+
+At an English station you are either overwhelmed with transportation,
+or you are without any except such as you were born with, and at the
+station for Marston Moor I asked for a fly in vain. But it was a most
+walkable afternoon, and the pleasant road into the region which the
+station-master indicated as that I was seeking invited the foot by its
+level stretch, sometimes under wayside trees, but mostly between open
+fields, newly reaped and still yellow with their stubble, or green with
+the rowen clover. Sometimes it ran straight and sometimes it curved,
+but it led so rarely near any human habitation that one would rather not
+have met any tramps beside one’s self on it. Presently I overtook one, a
+gentle old farm-wife, a withered blonde, whom I helped with the bundles
+she bore in either hand, in the hope that she could tell me whether I
+was near Marston Moor or not. But she could tell me only, what may have
+been of higher human interest, that her husband had the grass farm of
+a hundred and fifty acres, which we were coming to, for seventy-five
+pounds a year; and they had their own cattle, sheep, and horses, and
+were well content with themselves. She excused herself for not knowing
+more than vaguely of the battle-field, as not having been many years
+in the neighborhood; and being now come to a gate in the fields, she
+thanked me and took her way up a grassy path to the pleasant farmhouse I
+saw in the distance.
+
+It must have been about this time that it rained, having shone long
+enough for English weather, and it hardly held up before I was overtaken
+by a friendly youth on a bicycle, whom I stayed with the question
+uppermost in my mind. He promptly got off his wheel to grapple with the
+problem. He was a comely young fellow, an artisan of some sort from
+a neighboring town, and he knew the country well, but he did not know
+where my lost battle-field was. He was sure that it was near by: but he
+was sure there was no monument to mark the spot. Then we parted friends,
+with many polite expressions, and he rode on and I walked on.
+
+For a mile and more I met no other wayfarer, and as I felt that it was
+time to ask for Marston Moor again, I was very glad to be overtaken by
+a gentleman driving in a dog-cart, with his pretty young daughter on
+the wide seat with him. He halted at sight of the elderly pilgrim, and
+hospitably asked if he could not give him a lift, alleging that there
+was plenty of room. He was interested in my search, which he was not
+able definitely to promote, but he believed that if I would drive with
+him to his place I could find the battle-field, and, anyhow, I could get
+a trap back from the The Sun. I pleaded the heat I was in from walking,
+and the danger for an old fellow of taking cold in a drive through the
+cool air; and then, as old fellows do, we bantered each other about
+our ages, each claiming to be older than the other, and the kind, sweet
+young girl sat listening with that tolerance of youth for the triviality
+of age which is so charming. When he could do no more, he said he was
+sorry, and wished me luck, and drove on; and I being by this time tired
+with my three miles’ tramp, took advantage of a wayside farmhouse, the
+first in all the distance, and went in and asked for a cup of tea.
+
+The farm-wife, who came in out of her back garden to answer my knock,
+pleaded regretfully that her fire was down; but she thought I could
+get tea at the next house; and she was very conversable about the
+battle-field. She did not know just where it was, but she was sure it
+was quite a mile farther on; and at that I gave up the hope of it along
+with the tea. This is partly the reader’s loss, for I have no doubt
+I could have been very graphic about it if I had found it; but as for
+Marston Moor, I feel pretty certain that if it ever existed it does not
+now. A moor, as I understand, implies a sort of wildness, but nothing
+could be more domestic than the peaceful fields between which I had come
+so far, and now easily found my way back to the station. Easily, I say,
+but there was one point where the road forked, though I was sure it
+had not forked before, and I felt myself confronted with some sort,
+any sort, of exciting adventure. By taking myself firmly in hand, and
+saying, “It was yonder to the left where I met my kind bicycler, and we
+vainly communed of my evanescent battle-field,” and so keeping on, I got
+safely to the station with nothing more romantic in my experience than a
+thrilling apprehension.
+
+
+II
+
+I quite forgot Marston Moor in my self-gratulation and my recognition
+of the civility from every one which had so ineffectively abetted my
+search. Simple and gentle, how hospitable they had all been to my vain
+inquiry, and how delicately they had forborne to visit the stranger
+with the irony of the average American who is asked anything, especially
+anything he does not know! I went thinking that the difference was a
+difference between human nature long mellowed to its conditions, and
+human nature rasped on its edges and fretted by novel circumstances to a
+provisional harshness. I chose to fancy that unhuman nature sympathized
+with the English mood; in the sheep bleating from the pastures I heard
+the note of Wordsworth’s verse; and by the sky, hung in its low
+blue with rough, dusky clouds, I was canopied as with a canvas of
+Constable’s.
+
+It was the more pity, then, that at the station a shooting party,
+approaching from the other quarter with their servants and guns and
+dogs, and their bags of hares and partridges, should have given English
+life another complexion to the wanderer so willing to see it always
+rose color. The gunners gained the station platform first, and at once
+occupied the benches, strewing all the vacant places with their still
+bleeding prey. I did not fail of the opportunity to see in them the
+arrogance of class, which I had hitherto so vainly expected, and I
+disabled their looks by finding them as rude as their behavior. How
+different they were from the kind bicycler, or the gentleman in the
+dog-cart, or either one of the farm-wives who sorrowed so civilly not to
+know where my lost battle-field was!
+
+In England, it is always open to the passenger to enforce a claim to
+his share of the public facilities, but I chose to go into the licensed
+victualler’s next the station and sit down to a peaceable cup of tea
+rather than contest a place on that bloody benching; and so I made the
+acquaintance of an interior out of literature, such as my beloved Thomas
+Hardy likes to paint. On a high-backed rectangular settle rising against
+the wall, and almost meeting in front of the comfortable range, sat a
+company of rustics, stuffing themselves with cold meat, washed down with
+mugs of ale, and cozily talking. They gained indefinitely in my interest
+from being served by a lame woman, with a rhythmical limp, and I hope it
+was not for my demerit that I was served apart in the chillier parlor,
+when I should have liked so much to stay and listen to the rustic tale
+or talk. The parlor was very depressingly papered, but on its walls I
+had the exalted company of his Majesty the King, their Royal Highnesses
+the Prince and Princess of Wales, the late Premier, the Marquis of
+Salisbury, and, for no assignable reason except a general fitness for
+high society, the twelve Apostles in Da Vinci’s _Last Supper_, together
+with an appropriate view of York Minster.
+
+
+III
+
+I do not pretend this search for the battle-field of Marston Moor was
+the most exciting episode of my stay in York. In fact, I think it
+was much surpassed in a climax of dramatic poignancy incident to our
+excursion to Bishopsthorpe, down the Ouse, on one of the cosey little
+steamers which ply the stream without unreasonably crowding it against
+its banks. It was a most silvery September afternoon when we started
+from the quay at York, and after escaping from embarkment on a boat
+going in the wrong direction, began, with no unseemly swiftness, to
+scuttle down the current. It was a perfect voyage, as perfect as any I
+ever made on the Mississippi, the Ohio, the St. Lawrence, or the Hudson,
+on steamers in whose cabins our little boat would have lost itself. We
+had a full but not crowded company of passengers, overflowing into
+a skiff at our stern, in which a father and mother, with three women
+friends, preferred the high excitement of being towed to Bishopsthorpe,
+where it seemed that the man of the party knew the gardener. With each
+curve of the river and with each remove we got the city in more and more
+charming retrospective, till presently its roofs and walls and spires
+and towers were lost in the distance, and we were left to the sylvan
+or pastoral loveliness of the low shores. Here and there at a pleasant
+interval from the river a villa rose against a background of rounded
+tree tops, with Lombardy poplars picking themselves out before it, but
+for the most part the tops of the banks, with which we stood even on
+our deck, retreated from the waterside willows in levels of meadow-land,
+where white and red cows were grazing, and now and then young horses
+romping away from groups of their elders. It was all dear and kind and
+sweet, with a sort of mid-Western look in its softness (as the English
+landscape often has), and the mud-banks were like those of my native
+Ohio Valley rivers. The effect was heightened, on our return, by an
+aged and virtuously poor (to all appearance) flageolet and cornet band,
+playing _‘Way down upon the Suwanee River_, while the light played in
+“ditties no-tone” over the groves and pastures of the shore, and the
+shadows stretched themselves luxuriously out as if for a long night’s
+sleep. There has seldom been such a day since I began to grow old; a
+soft September gale ruffled and tossed the trees finely, and a subtle
+Italian quality mixed with the American richness of the sunshiny air; so
+that I thought we reached Bishopsthorpe only too soon, and I woke from a
+pleasant reverie to be told that the steamer could not land with us, but
+we must be taken ashore in the small boat which we saw putting out for
+us from its moorings. To this day I do not know why the steamer could
+not land, but perhaps the small boat had a prescriptive right in the
+matter. At any rate, it was vigorously manned by a woman, who took
+tuppence from each of us for her service, and presently earned it by the
+interest she showed in our getting to the Archbishop’s palace, or villa,
+the right way.
+
+[Illustration: YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER]
+
+So we went round by an alluring road to its forking, where, looking up
+to the left, we could see a pretty village behind Lombardy poplars,
+and coming down toward us in a victoria for their afternoon drive,
+two charmingly dressed ladies, with bright parasols, and looking very
+county-family, as we poor Americans imagine such things out of English
+fiction. We entered the archiepiscopal grounds through a sympathetic
+Gothic screen, as I will call the overture to the Gothic edifice in my
+defect of architectural terminology, though perhaps gateway would be
+simpler; and found ourselves in the garden, and in the company of
+those people we had towed down behind our steamer. They were with
+their friend, the gardener, and, claiming their acquaintance as
+fellow-passengers, we made favor with him to see the house. The
+housekeeper, or some understudy of hers, who received us, said the
+family were away, but she let us follow her through. That is more than
+I will let the reader do, for I know the duty of the cultivated American
+to the intimacies of the gentle English life; it is only with the simple
+life that I ever make free; there, I own, I have no scruple. But I will
+say (with my back turned conscientiously to the interior) that nothing
+could be lovelier than the outlook from the dining-room, and the whole
+waterfront of the house, on the wavy and willowy Ouse, and that I would
+willingly be many times an archbishop to have that prospect at all my
+meals.
+
+
+IV
+
+We despatched our visit so promptly that we got back to our boat-woman’s
+cottage a full hour before our steamer was to call for us. She had an
+afternoon fire kindled in her bright range, from the oven of which came
+already the odor of agreeable baking. Upon this hint we acted, and
+asked if tea were possible. It was, and jam sandwiches as well, or if
+we preferred buttered tea-cake, with or without currants, to jam
+sandwiches, there would be that presently. We preferred both, and we sat
+down in that pleasant parlor-kitchen, and listened, till the tea-cake
+came out of the oven and was split open and buttered smoking hot, to
+a flow of delightful and instructive talk. For our refection we paid
+sixpence each, but for our edification we are still, and hope ever to
+be, in debt. Our hostess was of a most cheerful philosophy, such as
+could not be bought of most modern philosophers for money. The flour for
+our tea-cakes, she said, was a shilling fivepence a stone, “And not too
+much for growing and grinding it, and all.” Every week-day morning she
+rose at half-past four, and got breakfast for her boys, who then rode
+their bicycles, or, in the snow, walked, all the miles of our voyage
+into York, where they worked in the railway shops. No, they did not
+belong to any union; the railway men did not seem to care for it; only a
+“benefit union.”
+
+She kept the house for her family, and herself ready to answer every
+hail from the steamer; but in her mellow English content, which was not
+stupid or sodden, but clever and wise, it was as if it were she, rather
+than the archbishop, whose nature expressed itself in a motto on one
+of the palace walls, “Blessed be the Lord who loadeth us with blessings
+every day.”
+
+When the range, warming to its work, had made her kitchen-parlor a
+little too hot to hold us, she hospitably suggested the river shore as
+cooler, where she knew a comfortable log we could sit on. Thither she
+presently followed when the steamer’s whistle sounded, and held her
+boat for us to get safely in. The most nervous of our party offered
+the reflection, as she sculled us out into the stream to overhaul the
+pausing steamer, that she must find the ferry business very shattering
+to the nerves, and she said,
+
+“Yes, but it’s nothing to a murder case I was on, once.”
+
+“Oh, what murder, what murder?” we palpitated back; and both of us
+forgot the steamer, so that it almost ran us down, while our ferrywoman
+began again:
+
+“A man shot a nurse--There! Throw that line, will you?”
+
+But he, who ought to have thrown the line for her, in his distraction
+let her drop her oar and throw the line herself, and then we scrambled
+aboard without hearing any more of the murder.
+
+This is the climax I have been working up to, and I call it a fine one;
+as good as a story to be continued ever ended an instalment with.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
+
+
+The Doncaster Races lured us from our hotel at York, on the first day,
+as I had dimly foreboded they would. In fact, if there had been no lure,
+I might have gone in search of temptation, for in a world where sins are
+apt to be ugly, a horse-race is so beautiful that if one loves beauty
+he can practise an aesthetic virtue by sinning in that sort. So I
+made myself a pretence of profit as well as pleasure, and in going to
+Doncaster I feigned the wish chiefly to compare its high event with that
+of Saratoga. I had no association with the place save horse-racing, and
+having missed Ascot and Derby Day, I took my final chance in pursuit
+of knowledge--I said to myself, “Not mere amusement”--and set out for
+Doncaster unburdened by the lightest fact concerning the place.
+
+
+I
+
+I learned nothing of it when there, but I have since learned, from
+divers trustworthy sources, that Doncaster is the Danum of Antoninus and
+the Dona Ceaster of the Saxons, and that it is not only on the line of
+the Northeastern Railway, but also on that famous Watling Street which
+from the earliest Saxon time has crossed the British continent from sea
+to sea, and seems to impress most of the cities north and south into a
+conformity with its line, like a map of the straightest American railway
+routes.
+
+Unless my ignorance has been abused, nothing remarkable has happened
+at Doncaster in two thousand years, but this is itself a distinction in
+that eventful England where so many things have happened elsewhere.
+It is the market town of a rich farming region, and has notable
+manufactures of iron and brass, of sacking and linen, of spun flax and
+of agricultural machines and implements. Otherwise, it is important only
+for its races, which began there three hundred years ago, and especially
+for its St. Leger Day, of which Lieutenant-General St. Leger became the
+patron saint in 1778, though he really established his Day two years
+earlier.
+
+Doncaster is a mighty pleasant, friendly, rather modern, and
+commonplacely American-looking town, with two-story trams gently ambling
+up and down its chief avenues, in the leisurely English fashion, and
+all of more or less arrival and departure at the race-grounds. In our
+company the reader will have our appetites for lunch, and if he will
+take his chance with us in the first simple place away from the station,
+he will help us satisfy them very wholesomely and agreeably at boards
+which seem festively set up for the occasion, and spread with hot
+roast-beef and the plain vegetables which accompany the national dish
+in its native land; or he can have the beef cold, or have cold lamb or
+chicken cold. His fellow-lunchers will be, as he may like well enough
+to fancy, of somewhat lower degree than himself, but they will all seem
+very respectable, and when they come out together, they will all be
+equalized in the sudden excitement which has possessed itself of the
+street, and lined the curbstones up and down with spectators, their
+bodies bent forward, and their faces turned in the direction of the
+station.
+
+
+II
+
+The excitement is caused by the coming of the King; and I wish that I
+could present that event in just its sincere unimpressiveness. I have
+assisted at several such events on the Continent, where, especially in
+Germany, they are heralded as they are in the theatre, with a blare of
+trumpets, and a sensation in the populace and the attendant military
+little short of an ague fit. There, as soon as the majesties mount into
+their carriages from the station, they drive off as swiftly as their
+horses can trot, and their subjects, who have been waiting for hours to
+see them, make what they can of a meagre half-minute’s glimpse of
+them. But how different was the behavior of that easy-going Majesty of
+England! As soon as I heard that he was coming, I perceived how anxious
+I had been in the half-year of my English sojourn to see him, and how
+bitterly I should have been disappointed to leave his realms without it.
+All kings are bad, I knew that well enough; but I also knew that some
+kings are not so bad as others, and I had been willing to accept at
+their face the golden opinions of this King, which, almost without
+exception, his lieges seemed to hold. Of course it is not hard to think
+well of a king if you are under him, just as it is not hard to think
+ill of him if you are not under him; but there is no use being bigotedly
+republican when there is nothing to be got by it, and I own the fact
+that his subjects like him willingly. Probably no man in his kingdom
+understands better than Edward VII. that he is largely a form, and that
+the more a form he is the more conformable he is to the English ideal
+of a monarch. But no Englishman apparently knows better than he when to
+leave off being a form and become a man, and he has endeared himself to
+his people from time to time by such inspirations. He is reputed on all
+hands to be a man of great good sense; if he is ever fooled it is not by
+himself, but by the system which he is no more a part of than the least
+of his subjects. If he will let a weary old man or a delicate woman
+stand indefinitely before him, he is no more to blame for that than for
+speaking English with a trace of German in his _th_ sounds; he did not
+invent his origins or his traditions. Personally, having had it out with
+life, he is as amiable and as unceremonious as a king may be. He shares,
+as far as he can, the great and little interests of his people. He has
+not, so far as noted, the gifts of some of his sisters, but he has much
+of his mother’s steadfast wisdom, and his father’s instinct for the
+right side in considerable questions; and he has his father’s prescience
+of the psychological moment for not bothering. Of course, he is a
+fetish; no Englishman can deny that the kingship is an idolatry; but
+he is a fetish with an uncommon share of the common man’s divinity.
+The system which provides him for the people provides them the best
+administration in the world, always naturally in the hands of their
+superiors, social and political; but we could be several times rottener
+than we administratively are, and still be incalculably reasonabler, as
+republicans, than those well-governed monarchists.
+
+[Illustration: DURHAM CATHEDRAL--NORTHWEST VIEW]
+
+Some of us are apt to forget the immense advantage which we have of the
+monarchical peoples in having cast away the very name of King, for with
+the name goes the nature of royalty and all that is under and around it.
+But because we are largely a fond and silly folk, with a false conceit
+of ourselves and others, we like to make up romances about the favor in
+which thrones, municipalities, and powers hold us. Once it was the Tsar
+of Russia who held us dear, and would do almost anything for Americans;
+now it is the King of England who is supposed rather to prefer us to his
+own people, and to delight to honor us. We attribute to him a feeling
+which a little thought would teach, us was wholly our own, and which
+would be out of nature if not out of reason with him. He is a man of
+sense, and not of sentiment, and except as a wise politician he could
+have no affection for a nation whose existence denies him. He is very
+civil to Americans; it is part of a constitutional king’s business to be
+civil to every one; but he is probably not sentimental about us; and we
+need not be sentimental about him.
+
+He looked like a man of sense, and not like a man of sentiment, that
+day as he drove through the Doncaster street on his way to the sport he
+loves beyond any other sport. He sat with three other gentlemen on the
+sidewise seats of the trap, preceded by outriders, which formed the
+simple turnout of the greatest prince in the world. He was at the end on
+the right, and he showed fully as stout as he was, in the gray suit he
+wore, while he lifted his gray top-hat now and then, bowing casually,
+almost absently, to the spectators fringing, not too deeply, the
+sidewalks. He was very, very stout, even after many seasons of
+Marienbad, and after the sufferings he had lately undergone, and he
+was quite like the pictures and effigies of him, down to those on the
+postage-stamps. He has a handsome face, still bearded in the midst of a
+mostly clean-shaving nation, and with the white hairs prevalent on
+the cheeks and temples; his head is bald atop, though hardly from the
+uneasiness of wearing a crown.
+
+It was difficult to realize him for what he was, and in the unmilitary
+keeping of a few policemen, he was not of the high histrionic presence
+that those German majesties were. The good-natured crowd did not strain
+itself in cheering, though it seemed to cheer cordially; and it did
+not stay long after the trap tooled comfortably away. I then addressed
+myself to a little knot of railway servants who lingered talking, and
+asked them what some carriages were still waiting for at the door of the
+station, and one of them answered with a lightness you do not expect
+in England, “Oh, Lord This, and Lady That, and the Hon. Mr.
+I-don’t-know-what’s-his-name.” The others laughed at this ribald satire
+of the upper classes, and I thought it safer to follow the King to the
+races lest I should hear worse things of them.
+
+
+III
+
+The races were some miles away, and when we got to the tracks we did
+not find their keeping very different from that of the Saratoga tracks,
+although the crowd was both smarter and shabbier, and it had got to the
+place through a town of tents and sheds, and a population of hucksters
+and peddlers, giving an effect of permanency to the festivity such as
+a solemnity of ours seldom has. When we bought our tickets we found, in
+the familiarity with the event expected of us, that there was no one to
+show us to our places; but by dint of asking we got to the Grand Stand,
+and mounted to our seats, which, when we stood up from them, commanded a
+wholly satisfactory prospect of the whole field.
+
+I do not know the dimensions of the Doncaster track, or how far they
+exceed those of the Saratoga track. Possibly one does not do its extent
+justice because there is no track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a
+green turf, with a certain course railed off on it. I hope the reader
+will be as much surprised as I was to realize that the sport of
+horse-racing in England gets its name of Turf from the fact that the
+races are run on the grass, and not on the bare ground, as with us. We
+call the sport the Turf, too, but that is because in this, as in so many
+other things, we lack incentive and invention, and are fondly colonial
+and imitative; we ought to call it the Dirt, for that is what it is with
+us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the definition in England which
+our course gives, and when it began, I missed the relief into which our
+track throws the bird-like sweep of the horses as they skim the naked
+earth in the distance.
+
+I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances
+the thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so
+scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the
+shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so
+much gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The
+crowd thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see,
+and bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with
+the shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the
+book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here.
+With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins;
+but I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at
+the Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the
+horse next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty close.
+By the end of the third or how far they exceed those of the Saratoga
+track. Possibly one does not do its extent justice because there is no
+track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a green turf, with a certain
+course railed off on it. I hope the reader will be as much surprised as
+I was to realize that the sport of horse-racing in England gets its name
+of Turf from the fact that the races are run on the grass, and not on
+the bare ground, as with us. We call the sport the Turf, too, but that
+is because in this, as in so many other things, we lack incentive and
+invention, and are fondly colonial and imitative; we ought to call it
+the Dirt, for that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the racing
+lacks the definition in England which our course gives, and when it
+began, I missed the relief into which our track throws the bird-like
+sweep of the horses as they skim the naked earth in the distance.
+
+I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances
+the thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so
+scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the
+shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so
+much gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The
+crowd thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see,
+and bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with
+the shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the
+book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here.
+With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins;
+but I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at
+the Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the
+horse next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty
+close. By the end of the third race he had softened into something like
+confidence toward me; certainly into conversability; such was the effect
+of my being a dead-game sport, or looking it. But how account for the
+trustfulness of the young woman on my other hand who wore her gold watch
+outside her dress, and who turned to the elderly stranger for sympathy
+in a certain supreme moment? This was when the crowd below crumpled
+suddenly together like the crushing of paper and the sense of something
+tragically mysterious in the distance clarified itself as the death of
+one of the horses. It had dropped from heart-break in its tracks, as if
+shot, and presently a string of young men and boys came dragging to some
+_spoliarium_ the long, slender body of the pretty creature over the turf
+which its hoofs had beaten a moment before. Then it was that the girl,
+with the watch on her breast, turned and asked, “Isn’t it sad?”
+
+[Illustration: FINCHALE PRIORY]
+
+
+IV
+
+She was probably not the daughter of a hundred earls, but there must
+have been some such far-descended fair among the ladies who showed
+themselves from time to time in the royal paddock across a little space
+from our Grand Stand. The enclosure has no doubt a more technical
+name, which I would call it by if I knew it, for I do not wish to be
+irreverent; but paddock is very sporty, and it must serve my occasion.
+The King never showed himself there at all, though much craned round for
+and eagerly expected. But ladies and gentlemen moved about in the close,
+and stood and talked together; very tall people, very easily straight
+and well set up, very handsome, and very amiable-looking; they may have
+been really kind and good, or they may have looked so to please the
+King and keep his spirits up. I did not then, but I do now, realize that
+these were courtiers, such as one has always read of, and were of very
+historical quality in their attendance on the monarch. I trust it will
+not take from the dignity of the fact if I note that several of the
+courtiers wore derby hats, and one was in a sack coat and a topper. I
+am not sure what the fairer reader will think if I tell that one of the
+ladies had on a dress with a white body and crimson skirt and sleeves,
+and a vast black picture-hat, and wore it with a charming air of
+authority.
+
+The weather, in the excitement of the races, had not known whether it
+was raining or not, but we feared its absent-mindedness, and at the end
+of the third race we went away. It is not well to trust an English day
+too far; this had begun with brilliant sunshine, but it dimmed as it
+wore on, and we could not know that it was keeping for us the surprise
+of a very refined sunset. My memory does not serve as to just how we had
+got out to the race-ground; I think, from our being set down at the very
+gate, that it was by hansom or by fly; but now we promised ourselves to
+walk back to town. We did not actually do so; we went back most of the
+way by tram; but we were the firmer about walking at the outset, because
+we presently found ourselves in a lane of gypsy tents, where there was
+an alluring sight and smell of frying fish and potatoes. In the midst of
+the refection, you could have your fortune told, very favorably, for a
+very little money. All up and down this happy avenue there went girls of
+several dozen sizes and ages, crying a particular kind of taffy, proper
+to the day and place, and never to be had on any other day in any other
+place.
+
+We had an hour before train-time, and we thought we would go and see
+the Parish Church of Doncaster, which we had read was worth seeing.
+Our belief was confirmed by a group of disappointed ladies in the
+churchyard, who said it was a most beautiful church inside, but that
+they had not seen it because it was shut. We proved the fact by trying
+the door, and then we came away consoling ourselves with the scoff that
+it was probably closed for the races. At the bookseller’s, where we
+stopped to buy some photographs of the interior of the church we had not
+seen, we lamented our disappointment, and the salesman said, “Perhaps
+it was closed for the races.” So our joke seemed to turn earnest, and on
+reflection it did not surprise us in that England of close-knit unities
+where people and prince are of one texture in their pleasures and
+devotions, and the Church is hardly more national than the Turf.
+
+
+V
+
+At Durham, which was my next excursion from York, I cannot claim,
+therefore, that my mission was more serious because it almost solely
+concerned the Church, or that it was more frivolous at Doncaster, where
+it almost solely concerned the Turf. My train started in a fine mist
+that turned to sun, but not before it had shown me with the local color,
+which a gray light lends everything, a pack of hounds crossing a field
+near the track with two huntsmen at their heels. They were not chasing,
+but running leisurely, and with their flower-like, loose spread over the
+green, and the pink-coated hunters on their brown mounts, they afforded
+a picture as vivid and of as perfect semblance to all my visions of
+fox-hunting as I could have asked. I had been hoping that I might see
+something of the famous sport, almost as English as the Church or the
+Turf, and there, suddenly and all unexpectedly, the sight fully and
+satisfyingly was. Now, indeed, I felt that my impression of English
+society was complete, and that I might go home and write novels of
+English high life, and do something to redeem myself a little from the
+disgrace I had fallen into with my fellow-plebeians by always writing
+of common Americans, like themselves, and never _grandes dames_ or ideal
+persons, or people in the best society.
+
+But I did not want to go home at once, or turn back from going to Durham
+through that pleasant landscape, where the mist hung between the trees
+which seemed themselves only heavier bulks of mist. The wheat in some
+of the fields was still uncut, and in others, where it had been gathered
+into sheaves, the rooks by hundreds were noisily gleaning in the track
+of the reapers. From this conventionally English keeping, I passed
+suddenly to the sight of the gaunt, dry, gravelly bed of a wide river,
+such as I had known in Central Italy, or the Middle West at home; and I
+realized once again that England is no island of one simple complexion,
+but is a condensed continent, with all continental varieties of feature
+in it. You must cover thousands and thousands of miles in our tedious
+lengths and breadths for the beauties and sublimities of scenery which
+you shall gather from fewer hundreds in England; I have no doubt they
+have even volcanoes there, but I did not see any, probably because the
+English are so reticent, and hate to make a display of any sort.
+
+
+VI
+
+It is because they are so, or possibly because of my ignorance, that I
+did not know or at all imagine how magnificent the Cathedral of Durham
+is, or what a matchless seat it has on the bluffs of the river, with
+depths of woods below its front, tossing in the rich chill of the
+September wind. As it takes flight for the heavens, to which its
+business is to invite the thought, it seems to carry the earth with it,
+for if you climb those noble heights, you find your feet still on the
+ground, in a most stately space of open level between the cathedral and
+its neighbor castle, which alone could be worthy of its high company.
+
+The castle is Tudor, but the cathedral is beyond all other English
+cathedrals, I believe, Norman, though to the naked eye it looks so
+Gothic, and probably is. Here I will leave the reader with any pictures
+or memories of it which he happens to have, for I have always held it
+a sin to try describing architecture, or if not a sin, a bore. What
+chiefly remains to me of my impression of Durham Cathedral is,
+strangely enough, an objection: I did not like those decorated pillars,
+alternating with the clustered columns of the interior, and I do not
+suppose I ever shall: the spiral furrows, the zigzag and lozenge figures
+chiselled in their surfaces, weakened them to the eye and seemed to
+trifle with their proud bulk.
+
+But to the castle of Durham I have no objection whatever. I should like
+to live in it, as I should in all other Tudor houses, great or small,
+that I saw, where, as I am constantly saying, a high ideal of comfort
+is realized. It is almost as nobly placed as the cathedral, and it is
+approached by a very stately courtyard, of like spacious effect with the
+cathedral piazza. Inside it there is a kitchen of the sixteenth century,
+with a company of neat serving-maids, too comely and young to be,
+perhaps, of the same period, that gives the tourist a high sense of the
+luxury in which the Bishop of Durham and the Judges of the Assize Courts
+live when they are residents in the castle. One sees their apartments,
+dim and rich, and darkly furnished, but not gloomily, both where they
+sleep and where they eat, and flatteringly envies them in a willingness
+for the moment to be a judge or a bishop for the sake of such a fit
+setting. There is also a fine crypt, with a fine dining-hall and a black
+staircase of ancient oak, and a gallery with classic busts, and other
+pictures worthy of wonder, let alone a history from the time of William
+the Conqueror, who first fancied a castle where it stands, down to the
+present day. The memory of such successive guests as the Empress Matilda
+and Henry II. her son, King John, Henry III., Edwards I., II., and III.,
+Queen Philippa, Henry VI., and James I., and Charles I., and Edward
+VII., abides in the guidebook, and may be summoned from its page to
+the chambers of the beautiful old place by any traveller intending
+impressions for literary use from a medieval environment in perfect
+repair.
+
+
+VII
+
+One must be hard to satisfy if one is not satisfied with Durham Castle,
+and its interior contented me as fully as the exterior of the Cathedral.
+I went a walk, after leaving the castle, for a further feast of the
+Cathedral from the paths along the shelving banks of the beautiful
+Weare. There, at a certain point, I met a studious-looking gentleman who
+I am sure must have been a professor of Durham University hard by; and
+I asked him, with due entreaty for pardon, “What river was that.” He
+quelled the surprise he must have felt at my ignorance and answered
+gently, “The Weare.” “Ah, to be sure! The Weare,” I said, and thanked
+him, and longed for more talk with him, but felt myself so unworthy that
+I had not the face to prompt him further. He passed, and then I met a
+man much more of my own kind, if not probably so little informed. That
+rich, chill gale was still tossing and buffeting the tree tops, and he
+made occasion of this to say, “This is a cold wynd a-blowin’, Mister.”
+ “It is, rather,” I assented. “I was think-in’,” he observed from an
+apparent generalization, “that I wished I was at home.” Then he suddenly
+added, “Help a poor man!” I was not wholly surprised at the climax,
+and I offered him, provisionally, a penny. “Will that do?” He hesitated
+perceptibly; then he allowed, with a subtle reluctance, “Yes, that’ll
+do,” and so passed on to satisfy, I hope, the wish he thought he had.
+
+[Illustration: DURHAM CATHEDRAL--ITS MATCHLESS SEAT ON THE BLUFFS OF THE
+RIVER]
+
+I pursued my own course, as far as the bridge which spans the Weare near
+a most picturesque mill, and then I stopped a kindly-looking workman
+and asked him whether he thought I could find a fly or cab anywhere near
+that would take me into the town. He answered, briefly but consistently
+with his looks, “Ah doot,” and as he owned that it was a long way to
+town, I let his doubt decide me to go back to the station.
+
+I felt that I ought to have driven from there into the town, and seen
+it, and taken to York a later train than the one I had in mind. In the
+depravity induced by my neglect of this plain duty, I went, with my
+third class return ticket conscious in my pocket, into the first class
+refreshment room, and had tea there, as if I had been gentry at the very
+least, and possibly nobility. Then, having a good deal of time still
+on my hands, I loitered over the book-stall of the station, and stole a
+passage of conversation with a kindly clergyman whom I found looking at
+the pretty shilling editions filling the cases. I said, How nice it was
+to have Hazlitt in that green cloth; and he said, Yes, but he held for
+Gibbon in leather; and just then his train came in and he ran off to
+it, and left me to my guilt in not having gone to see Durham. It was now
+twilight, and too late; but there the charming old town still is, and
+will long remain, I hope, with its many memories of war and peace, for
+whoever will visit it. Certainly there had been no lack of adventures in
+my ample hour. It was as charming to weave my conjectures, about the
+two gentlemen with whom I had so barely spoken, as to have carried
+my acquaintance with them further, and I cannot see how it would have
+profited me to know more even of that fellow-man who, in the cold wynd
+a-blowing, had just been thinking he wished he was at home.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS
+
+
+It was fit that on our way to Boston we should pause in passing through
+Cambridge. That was quite as we should have done at home, and I can only
+wish now that we had paused longer, though every moment that kept us
+from Boston, if it had been anywhere but in England, would have been a
+loss. There, it was all gain, and all joy, the gay September 24th
+that we went this divine journey. My companion was that companionable
+archaeologist who had guided my steps in search of the American origins
+in London, and who was now to help me follow the Pilgrim Fathers over
+the ground where they sojourned when they were only the Pilgrim Sons.
+At divers places on the way, after we left London, he pointed out some
+scene associated with American saints or heroes. We traversed the region
+that George William Curtis’ people came from, hard by Roxburgh, and
+Eliot’s, the Apostle to the Indians; again we skirted the Ralph Waldo
+Emerson country, with its big market town of Bishop’s Stortford; and
+beyond Ely, where we stopped for the Cathedral and a luncheon, not
+unworthy of it, at the station, he startled me from a pleasant drowse I
+had fallen into in our railway carriage, with the cry: “There! That is
+where Captain John Smith was born.” “Where? Where?” I implored too late,
+looking round the compartment everywhere. “Back where those chickens
+were.”
+
+
+I
+
+That was the nearest I came to seeing one of the most famous Virginian
+origins. But you cannot see everything in England; there are too many
+things; and if the truth must be known I cared more for the natural
+features than the historical facts of the landscape. The country was
+flat, and a raw green, as it should be in that raw air, under that
+dun sky, with sheep hardily biting the short tough pasturage under the
+imbrowning oaks and elms, and the olive-graying willows, beside the
+full, still streams scarce wetter than the ground they dreamed through.
+
+We did not reach Boston until six o’clock, when the day was already
+waning, and the Stump of St. Botolph’s Church stood dim against the sky.
+It was a long drive through the suburban streets from the station to the
+hotel, which we found full, and which with its crazy floors touched the
+fancy as full of something besides guests. But it was well for us so,
+because across the market-place, which forms the chief public square
+of Boston, was a far better hotel, where we were welcomed to the
+old-fashioned ideal of the English inn, such as I did not so nearly
+realize anywhere else. The ideal was a little impaired by the electric
+light in our bedrooms, but it was not a very brilliant electric light,
+and there was a damp cold in the corridors which allowed no doubt of its
+genuineness. In the dining-room, which was also the reading-room, there
+was an admirable image of a fire in the grate, and a prevailing warmth
+and brightness which cheered the heart of exile. When we presently had
+dinner, specialized for us by certain differences from that of two other
+travellers, there seemed nothing more to ask, except the conversation of
+our companions, and this we duly had, quite as if we were four wayfarers
+met there in a book. One of these gentlemen proved a solicitor from
+Bath, and that made me feel more at home, knowing and loving Bath as I
+did. It did not matter that in trying for some mutual acquaintance
+there we failed; our good-will was everything; and the solicitor was
+intelligent and agreeable. The other gentleman, tall, dark, of urbane
+stateliness, was something more, in the touch of Oriental suavity
+which, more than his nose, betrayed him; and it appeared, in delightful
+suggestion of the old-time commercial intimacy of the Dutch and English
+coasts, that he was from Holland, and next morning at breakfast he
+developed a large valise, which I now think held samples. If he was a
+Dutch Jew, he was probably a Spanish Jew by descent, and what will the
+difficult reader have more, in the materials for his romance? Did we
+gather about the grate after we had done dinner, and each tell the
+story of his life, or at least the most remarkable thing that had ever
+happened to him?
+
+[Illustration: THE “STUMP” OF ST. BOTOLPH’S CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY]
+
+I cannot say, but I remember that my friend and I, in my instant hunger
+for Boston, which was greater than my hunger for dinner, set forth while
+the meal was preparing, and visited the Church of St. Botolph. To reach
+it we had to pass through the greater length of the market-place, one
+of the most picturesque in England, and the worthy ancestress of
+Faneuil Hall and Quincy market-places, which are the most picturesque in
+America. At one side of its triangle is the birthplace and dwelling
+of Jean Ingelow, and at the point nearest the church is the statue of
+Herbert Ingram, the less famous but more locally recognized Bostonian,
+who founded the _Illustrated London News_ with the money he made by the
+invention and sale of Old Parr’s Pills. He was thrice sent to Parliament
+from his native town, and he related it to America, after two centuries,
+by drowning in Lake Michigan. “R. N.,” the otherwise anonymous author of
+a very intelligent and agreeable _Handbook of Boston_, relates that in
+his first canvass for Parliament Ingram was opposed by a gentleman who,
+when he asked the voices of the voters, after the old English fashion,
+was told by four of them in succession that they were promised “to their
+cousin Ingram,” and who thereupon declared that if he had known Ingram
+“was cousin to the whole town” he would, never have stood against him.
+Like the Bostonians of Massachusetts, the Bostonians of Lincolnshire
+were in fact closely knit together by ties of kinship, owing, “R. N.”
+ believes, to the isolation of Boston before the draining of its fens,
+and not to their conviction that there were no outsiders worthy to mate
+with them.
+
+
+II
+
+The house where the martyrologist John Fox first saw the light was
+replaced long ago by a famous old inn, pulled down in its turn; but the
+many and many Americans who visit Boston may still visit the house where
+Jean Ingelow was born. Whether they may see more than the outside of it
+I do not know from experiment or even inquiry. “R. N.” will say nothing
+of her but that she was born, and that her father was a banker; perhaps
+he thinks that she has spoken sufficiently for herself.
+
+[Illustration: THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND QUINCY
+MARKET-PLACES]
+
+The air of the market-place, as we crossed to the church, was of a
+pleasant bleakness, and the Witham was coldly washing under the wall
+which keeps St. Botolph from it. In the dimness we could have only a
+conjecture of the church’s outward beauty, and of the grandeur of the
+tower climbing into the evening, where it has hailed so many myriads
+of moving ships, and beckoned them to safety. But within, where it was
+already night, the church was cheerfully luminous with Welsbach lights,
+which showed it all wreathed and garlanded for a harvest festival,
+began the day before, and to be concluded now with some fit religious
+observance. The blossoms and leaves were a little wilted and withered,
+but the fruits and vegetables were there in sturdy endurance, and
+together they swathed the pulpit from which John Cotton used to preach,
+and all but hid its structure from view, like flowers of rhetoric
+softening some hard doctrine.
+
+Apparently, however, Cotton’s doctrine was not anywise too hard, or
+even hard enough, for such “a factious people, who were imbued with the
+Puritan spirit,” as he found in Boston, when he was first elected vicar
+of St. Botolph’s; and it was not till Archbishop Laud’s ecclesiastical
+tyrannies began that he came to see “the Sin of Conformity” and to
+preach resistance. His conflict with the authorities went so far that
+exile to another Boston in another hemisphere became his only hope.
+Or, as Lord Dorset intimated, “if he had been guilty of drunkenness,
+uncleanness, or any lesser fault, he could have obtained his pardon,
+but as he was guilty of Puritanism, and Non-conformity, the crime was
+non-pardonable; and therefore he advised him to flee for his safety.”
+
+The Cotton Chapel, so called, was restored mainly with moneys received
+from Cotton’s posterity, lineal or lateral, in his city of refuge
+overseas, and “the corbels that support the timbered ceiling are carved
+with the arms of certain of the early colonists of New England.” Edward
+Everett, one of Cotton’s descendants, wrote the dedicatory inscription
+in Latin, which “R. N.” has Englished in verse, and I am the more
+scrupulous to quote it, because, as I must own with my usual reluctant
+honesty, I quite missed seeing the Cotton Chapel.
+
+     That here John Cotton’s memory may survive
+     Where for so long he labored when alive,
+     In James’ reign and Charles’, ere it ceased--
+     A grave, skilled, learned, earnest parish-priest;
+     Till from the strife that tossed the Church of God
+     He in a new world sought a new abode,
+     To a new England, a new Boston came,
+     (That took, to honor him, that reverend name)
+     Fed the first flock of Christ that gathered there--
+     Till death deprived it of its shepherd’s care--
+     There well resolved all doubts of mind perplext,
+     Whether with cares of this world or the next;
+     Two centuries five lustra from the year
+     That saw the exile leave his labors here,
+     His family, his townsmen, with delight--
+     (Whom to the task their English kin invite)--
+     To the fair fane he served so well of yore,
+     His name, in two worlds honored, thus restore,
+     This chapel renovate, this tablet place,
+     In this, the year of man’s recovered Grace,
+                         1855.
+
+
+III
+
+I missed most of the other memorable things in the church that night,
+but I saw fleetingly some of the beautiful tombs for which it is famous;
+the effigies of the dead lay in their niches, quietly, as if already
+tucked away for the night, in the secular sleep of the dust beneath. The
+tombs were more famous than they, and more beautiful, if the faces of
+some were true likenesses, but after so many centuries one ought not to
+require even women to be pretty.
+
+[Illustration: THE RIVER AT EVENING]
+
+We had not begun to have enough of Boston yet, and after dinner we went
+a long walk up the Witham, away from the parapet before the church,
+under which its deep tides are always washing to and fro. In the
+dimness, after we had got a little to the outskirts of the town, there
+seemed shipyards along the river’s course, but at one place there was
+a large building brilliantly lighted, which from certain effects at the
+windows we decided to be a printing-office on the scale of those in and
+near our own Boston. What was our shame and grief the next morning
+to find it was a cigar factory, and to learn that cigar and cigarette
+making was almost the chief industry of the mother Boston. There are
+really two large tobacco factories there running overtime, and always
+advertising for more women and girls to do their work; and in our
+Boston, not so long ago, smoking in the street was forbidden! Such are
+the ironies of life.
+
+What the shipyards had turned into by daylight, I do not now remember.
+The Witham had turned into a long, deep gash, cut down into the clay
+twenty feet from the level of the flood tides. We crossed on a penny
+ferry which the current pushed over in the manner of the earliest
+ferries, near the tobacco factory, and came back into the heart of the
+town through streets of low stone houses, with few buildings of note to
+dignify their course. Small craft lay along the steep muddy shores, and
+at one place a little excursion steamer was waiting for the tide to
+come in and float it for the fulfilment of its promise of sailing at ten
+o’clock. We idly longed to make its voyage with it, and if the chance
+were offering now, I certainly should not forego it as I did then. But
+when you are in a foreign place, no matter how much you have travelled
+and how well you know that it will not offer soon again, you reject the
+most smiling chance because you think you can take it any time.
+
+The morning was soft and warm, with a sun shining amiably on the rather
+commonplace old town. I had risen betimes that I might go and get
+a Spanish melon for my breakfast, but at eight o’clock I found the
+fruiterer’s locked and barred against me. I lingered and hungered for
+the melons which I saw in his window, and then I tried other fruiterers,
+but none of them was stirring yet. I reflected how different it would
+have been in our own Boston; and if it had not been for the market
+people coming into the square and beginning to dress their stalls with
+vegetables, and fish, and native fruits, such as hard pears and knotty
+apples, I do not know how ill I might have come away thinking of that
+idle mother Boston. In other squares there were cattle for sale later,
+and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the
+markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place
+found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping
+with the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which,
+once for all, I must own was not an impressive place.
+
+The best thing in it, and the thing you are always coming back to,
+is the beautiful church, to which we paid a second visit early in the
+forenoon. We found it where we left it the night before, lifting its
+tower from the brink of the Witham, and looking far out over the flat
+land to a sea no flatter. The land seems indeed, like so much English
+coast, merely the sea come ashore, and turned into fens for the greater
+convenience of the fishermen, whom, with the deeper sea sailors, we
+saw about the town, lounging through the crooked streets, and hanging
+bare-armed upon the parapets of the bridges. Now we found the church
+had about its foot a population of Bostonians for whom, under their flat
+gravestones, it had been chiming the quarters from its mellow-throated
+bells, while the Bostonians on our side had been hustling for liberty,
+and money, and culture, and all the good things of this world, and
+getting them in a measure that would astonish their namesakes. Within
+the church we saw again the beautiful tombs of the night before, and
+others like them, and again we saw the pulpit of John Cotton, which we
+could make out a little better than at first, because its garlands were
+a little more withered and shrunken away. But better than either we
+realized the perfection of the church interior as a whole, so ample, so
+simple, such a comfortable and just sufficient eyeful.
+
+
+IV
+
+From other interests in St. Botolph’s you somehow keep always, or
+finally, coming to the Stump, as the tower is called somewhat in the
+humor of our Boston. It is not so fair within as without; that could
+not be in the nature of things; and yet the interior of the tower has a
+claim upon the spectator’s wonder, if not his admiration, which, so far
+as I know, the interior of no other tower has. It is all treated as a
+loftier room of the church, and its ceiling, a hundred and fifty feet
+from the ground, is elaborately and allegorically groined. The work was
+done when the whole church was restored about half a century ago, and
+has not the claim of medieval whim upon the fancy. Not so much pleasure
+as he might wish mingles with the marvel of the beholder, who carries a
+crick in the neck away from the sight, and yet once, but not more, in a
+way, it is worth while to have had the sight. Certainly this treatment
+of the tower is unique; there is nothing to compare with it in Boston,
+Massachusetts, and cannot be even when the interior of the Old South is
+groined.
+
+When we came out of the church, we found the weather amusing itself
+as usual in England, raining with wind, then blowing without rain, and
+presently, but by no means decisively, sunning without either wind or
+rain. The conditions were favorable to a further exploration of the
+town, which seemed to have a passion for old cannon, and for sticking
+them about in all sorts of odd nooks and corners. We found one smaller
+piece over a gateway, which we were forbidden by a sign-board to enter
+on pain of prosecution for trespassing. There was nothing else to
+prevent our entering, and we went in, to find ourselves in an alley with
+nothing but a Gypsy van in it. Nothing but a Gypsy van! As if that were
+not the potentiality of all manner of wild romance! Whether the alley
+belonged to Gypsies, or the Gypsies had trespassed by leaving their van
+in it, I shall now probably never know, but I commend the inquiry to any
+reader of mine whom these pages shall inspire to repeat our pilgrimage.
+
+[Illustration: LIFTING ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM]
+
+There was no great token of genteel life in Boston, so far as we saw it,
+but perhaps we did not look in the right places. There were good shops,
+but not fine or large ones, and I am able to report of the intellectual
+status that there are three weekly newspapers, but no dailies, which
+could not be the case in any American town of fourteen thousand people.
+Concerning society, I can only say that in our wanderings we came at one
+point on a vast, high-walled, iron-gated garden, which looked as if it
+might have society beyond it, but not being positively forbidden we did
+not penetrate it. We did indeed visit the ancient grammar-school, one
+of those foundations which in England were meant originally for the poor
+deserving of scholarship, but which have nearly all lapsed to the more
+deserving rich, careful of the contamination of the lower classes.
+Being out of term the school was closed to its pupils, but we found
+a contractor there removing the old stoves and putting in a system of
+hot-water heating, which he said was better fitted to resist the cold
+of the Boston winters. He was not a very conversable man, but so much we
+screwed out of him, with the added fact that the tuition of that school
+was no longer free. It came to some five guineas a year, no great sum,
+but perhaps sufficient to keep the school, with the other influences,
+select enough for the patronage to which it had fallen. It was a
+pleasant place, with a playground before it, which in the course of
+generations there must have been a good deal of schoolboy fun got out
+of.
+
+
+V
+
+There remained for us now only the Guildhall to visit, and we had left
+that to the last because it was the thing that had mostly brought us
+to Boston. It was the scene of the trial and imprisonment of those poor
+people of the region roundabout who were trying to escape from their
+“dread lord,” James the First, and were arrested for this crime, and
+brought to answer for it before the magistrates of the town. Their dread
+lord had then lately met some ministers of their faith at Hampton Court,
+and there browbeaten, if not beaten, them in argument, so that he was in
+no humor to let, these people, who afterward became the Pilgrim Fathers,
+get away to Holland, where there was no dread lord, or at least none of
+King James’ thinking.
+
+But no words can be so good to tell of all this as the words of Governor
+Bradford in his _Historie of Plymouth Plantation_, where he says that
+“ther was a large companie of them purposed to get passage at Boston in
+Lincolnshire, and for that end had hired a shipe wholy to them selves, &
+made agreement with the maister to be ready at a certaine day, and take
+them and their goods in, at a conveniente place, wher they accordingly
+would all attende in readiness. So after long waiting, & large expences,
+though he kepte not day with them, yet he came at length & tooke them
+in, in the night. But when he had them & their goods abord, he betrayed
+them, haveing before hand complotted with the serchers & other officers
+so to doe; who tooke them, and put them into open boats, & ther rifled
+and ransaked them, searching them to their shirts for money, yea even
+the women furder then became modestie; and then caried them back into
+the towne, & made them a spectakle & wonder to the multitude, which
+came flocking on all sides to behould them. Being thus first, by the
+catchpoule officer, rifled, & stripte of their money, books, and much
+other goods, they were presented to the magistrates, and messengers
+sente to informe the lords of the Counsell of them; and so they were
+comited to ward. Indeed the magistrats used them courteously, and shewed
+them what favour they could; but could not deliver them till order
+came from the Counsell-table. But the issue was that after a months
+imprisonmente, the greatest parte were dismiste, & sent to the places
+from whence they came; but 7. of the principall were still kept in
+prison, and bound over to the Assises.”
+
+My excellent “R. N.” of the _Handbook of Boston_ is anxious to have his
+reader, as I in turn am anxious to have mine, distinguish between these
+future Pilgrim Fathers and the gentlemen and scholars who later founded
+Boston in Massachusetts Bay, and called its name after that of the town
+they had dwelt in or often visited before they left the handsome keeping
+of the gentler life of Lincolnshire. Such were Richard Bellingham,
+Edmund Quincy, Thomas Leverett, John Cotton, Samuel Whiting, and
+others, known to our colonial and national history. Not even Bradford
+or Brewster, afterward dignified figures in Plymouth colony, were of the
+humble band, men, women, and children, that the officers of Boston took
+from their vessel. “Pathetic but splendid figures,” my brave “R. N.”
+ calls them, and he tells how, after a month’s jail, they were “sent home
+broken men, to endure the scoffs of their neighbors and the rigors of
+ecclesiastical discipline.”
+
+
+VI
+
+The dungeons which remain to witness of their hardships in Boston are of
+thick-walled, iron-grated stone, and the captives were fed on bread
+and water within smell of the roasting and broiling of the Guildhall
+kitchens immediately beside them. I will not conjecture with “R. N.”
+ that they were put there “by a refinement of cruelty,” so that they
+might suffer the more in that vicinage. “The magistrates” who had “used
+them courteously and shewed them what favour they could,” would not have
+willed that; but perhaps “the Counsell-table” did; and it was certainly
+a hardship that the dungeons and the kitchens were so close together, as
+any man may see at this day. Neither the dungeons nor the kitchens are
+any longer used; the spits and grates are rusted where the fires blazed,
+and the cells where the Pilgrims suffered are now full of large earthen
+jars. For no other or better reason, the large open spaces of the
+basement outside of them were scattered about with agricultural
+implements, ploughs, harrows, and the like. It was the belief of my
+companion, founded on I know not what fact, that the hall in which the
+Pilgrims were tried was a large upper chamber which we found occupied by
+a boys’ school. The door stood partly ajar, and we could see the master
+within walking up and down before some twenty boys, as if waiting for
+one of them to answer some question he had put them. Perhaps it was a
+question of local history, for none of them seemed able to answer it;
+presently when a boy came out on some errand, and we stopped him, and
+asked him where it was the Pilgrims had been tried, he did not know,
+and apparently he had never heard of the Pilgrims. He was a very
+nice-looking boy, and otherwise not unintelligent; certainly he was
+well-mannered, as nice-looking English boys are apt to be with their
+elders; perhaps he had heard too much of the Pilgrims, and had purposely
+forgotten them. This might very well have happened in a place like
+Boston where such hordes of Americans are coming every year, and asking
+so many hard questions concerning an incident of local history not
+wholly creditable to the place. He could justly have said that the same
+or worse might have happened to the Pilgrims anywhere else in England,
+under the dread lord there then was, and in fact something of the same
+hardship did befall them afterward at the place a little northeast of
+Boston, which we were now to visit for their piteous sake.
+
+“The nexte spring after,” as Bradford continues the narrative of their
+sorrows, “ther was another attempte made by some of these & others, to
+get over at an other place. And so it fell out, that they light of a
+Dutchman at Hull, having a ship of his owne belonging to Zealand; they
+made agreements with him, and acquainted him with their condition,
+hoping to find more faithfullnes in him, then in the former of their
+owne nation. He bad them not fear, for he would doe well enough. He
+was by appointment to take them in betweene Grimsbe & Hull, where was
+a large comone a good way distante from any towne. Now against the
+prefixed time, the women & children, with the goods, were sent to the
+place in a small barke, which they had hired for that end; and the men
+were to meete them by land. But it so fell out, that they were ther a
+day before the shipe came, and the sea being rough, and the women very
+sicke, prevailed with the seamen to put into a creeke hardby, wher they
+lay on ground at lowwater. The nexte morning the shipe came, but they
+were fast, & could not stir till about noone. In the mean time, the
+shipe maister, perceiveing how the matter was, sente his boate to be
+getting the men abord whom he saw ready, walking aboute the shore. But
+after the first boat full was gott abord, & she was ready to goe for
+more, the Mr. espied a greate company, both horse & foote, with bills,
+& gunes, & other weapons; for the countrie was raised to take them. The
+Dutchman seeing this swore his countries oath, ‘sacremente,’ and having
+the wind faire, waiged his Ancor, hoysed sayles, & away. But the poore
+men which were gott abord, were in great distress for their wives and
+children, which they saw thus to be taken, and were left destitute of
+their helps; and them selves also, not having a cloath to shifte them
+with, more then they had on their baks, & some scarce a peney aboute
+them, all they had being abord the barke. It drew tears from their
+eyes, and any thing they had they would have given to have been a shore
+againe; but all in vaine, ther was no remedy, they must thus sadly part.
+The rest of the men there were in greatest danger, made shift to escape
+away before the troope could surprise them: those only staying that best
+might, to be assistante unto the women. But pitifull it was to see the
+heavie case of these poore women in this distress: what weeping & crying
+on every side, some for their husbands, that were carried away in the
+ship as is before related; others not knowing what should become of
+them, & their little ones; others again melted in teares, seeing their
+poore little ones hanging aboute them, crying for feare, and quaking
+with could. Being thus aprehanded, they hurried from one place to
+another, and from one justice to another, till in the ende they knew not
+what to doe with them; for to imprison so many women & innocent children
+for no other cause (many of them) but that they must goo with their
+husbands, seemed to be unreasonable and all would crie out of them;
+and to send them home againe was as difficult, for they aleged, as the
+trueth was, they had no homes to goe to, for they had either sould, or
+otherwise disposed of their houses & livings. To be shorte, after they
+had been thus turmoyled a good while, and conveyed from one constable to
+another, they were glad to be ridd of them in the end upon any termes:
+for all were wearied & tired with them. Though in the mean time they
+(poore soules) indured miserie enough; and thus in the end necessitie
+forste a way for them.”
+
+
+VII
+
+If there is any more touching incident in the history of man’s
+inhumanity to man, I do not know it, or cannot now recall it; and it was
+to visit the scene of it near “Grimsbe,” or Great Grimsby, as it is now
+called, that we set out, after viewing their prison in Boston, over wide
+plains, with flights of windmills alighted on them everywhere. Here and
+there one seemed to have had its wings clipped, and we were told by a
+brighter young fellow than we often had for a travelling companion
+that this was because steam had been put into it as a motive power more
+constant than wind, even on that wind-swept coast. There seems to have
+been nothing else, so far as my note-book witnesses, to take up our
+thoughts in the short run to Great Grimsby, and for all I know now I
+may have drowsed by many chicken-yards marking the birthplace of our
+discoverers and founders. We got to Great Grimsby in time for a very
+lamentable lunch in a hostelry near the station, kept, I think, for such
+“poore people” as the Pilgrims were, with stomachs not easily turned by
+smeary marble table-tops with a smeary maid having to take their orders,
+and her ineffective napkin in her hand. The honesty as well as the
+poverty of the place was attested, when, returning to recover a
+forgotten umbrella, we were met at the door by this good girl, who had
+left her bar to fetch it in anticipation of all question.
+
+At Great Grimsby, it seemed, there was no vehicle but a very exceptional
+kind of cab,--looking like a herdic turned wrongside fore, and unable
+to orient itself aright,--available for the long drive to that “large
+comone a good way distante from any towne,” which we were to make, if
+we wished to visit the scene of the Pilgrims’ sufferings in their second
+attempt to escape from their dread lord. In this strange equipage,
+therefore, we set out, and nine long miles we drove through a country
+which seemed to rise with increasing surprise at us and our turnout on
+each inquiry we made for the way from chance passers. Just beyond the
+suburbs of the town we entered the region of a vast, evil smell which
+we verified as that of the decaying fish spread upon the fields, for
+a fertilizer after they had missed their market in that great fishing
+centre. Otherwise the landscape was much the ordinary English landscape
+of the flatter parts, but wilder and rougher than in the south or west,
+and constantly growing more so as we drove on and on. Our cabman kept
+a good courage, as long as the highway showed signs of much travel,
+but when it began to falter away into a country road, he must have
+lost faith in our sanity, though he kept an effect of the conventional
+respect for his nominal betters which English cabmen never part with
+except in a dispute about fares and distances. We stayed him as well
+as we could with some grapes and pears, which we found we did not
+want after our lunch, and which we handed him up through his little
+trap-door, but a plaintive quaver grew into his voice, and he let his
+horse lag in the misgiving which it probably shared with him. Nothing
+of signal interest occurred in our progress except at one point, near
+a Methodist chapel, where we caught sight of a gayly painted blue van,
+lettered over with many texts and mottoes, which my friend explained
+as one of the vans intinerantly used by extreme Protestants of the Anne
+Askew persuasion to prevent the spread of Romanism in England.
+
+The signs of travel had not only ceased, but a little in front of us the
+way was barred by a gate, and beyond this gate there was nothing but a
+sort of savage pasture, with many red and brown cattle in it, gathered
+questioningly about the barrier, or lifting their heads indifferently
+from the grass. Just before we reached the gate we passed a peasant’s
+cottage, where he was sociably getting in his winter’s coal, and he and
+his wife and children, and the carter, all leaned upon whatever supports
+they found next them, and stared at the extraordinary apparition of two,
+I hope, personable strangers driving in a hansom of extreme type into a
+cow pasture. But we were not going to give ourselves away to their too
+probable ignorance by asking if that were the place where the Pilgrims
+who founded New England were first stopped from going to Holland.
+
+My friend dismounted, and opened the gate, and we drove in among the
+cattle, and after they had satisfied a peaceful curiosity concerning us,
+they went about their business of eating grass, and we strayed over “the
+large comone,” and tried to imagine its looks nearly three hundred years
+before. They could not have been very different; the place could hardly
+have been much wilder, and there was the “creeke hardby wher they lay,”
+ the hapless women and children, in their boat “at lowwater,” while the
+evening came on, no doubt, just as it was doing with us, the weather
+clearing, and the sunset glassy and cold. Off yonder, away across the
+solitary moor, was the course of the Humber, marked for us by the trail
+of a steamer’s smoke through the fringes of trees, and for them by the
+sail of the Dutchman, who, when he saw next day that “great company,
+both horse and foote, with bills and gunes, and other weapons,” coming
+to harry those poor people, “swore his countries oath, ‘sacremente,’
+and having the wind faire, waiged his ancor, hoysed sails, and away,”
+ leaving those desolate women and their little ones lamenting.
+
+
+VIII
+
+On our way back we stopped at a little country church, so peaceful, so
+very peaceful, in the evening light, where it stood, withdrawn from the
+highway, Norman and Gothic without, and within all so sweet and bare
+and clean, that we could not believe in the old ecclesiasticism
+which persecuted the Puritans into the exile whither they carried the
+persecuting spirit with them. A pretty child, a little girl, opened the
+churchyard gate and held it for us to pass, and her gentleness made me
+the more question the history of those dreadful days in the past. When I
+saw a young lady, in the modern dress which I had so often lost my heart
+to at the Church Parade in Hyde Park, going up a leafy lane, toward the
+vicarage, from having been for tennis and afternoon tea at some pleasant
+home in the neighborhood, I denied the atrocious facts altogether. She
+had such a very charming hat on.
+
+The suburbs of Great Grimsby, after you reach them through that zone of
+bad smell, are rather attractive, and you get into long clean streets of
+small stone houses, like those of Plymouth or Southampton, and presently
+you reach the Humber, which is full of the steamers and sail, both
+fishing and deep sea, of the prosperous port, with great booms of
+sawlogs from Norway, half filling the channel, and with a fringe of tall
+chimneys from the sawmills along the shores. Great Grimsby is not only
+the centre of a vast distributing trade in coal and lumber, but of a
+still vaster trade in fish. It cuts one’s pride, if one has believed
+that Gloucester, Massachusetts, is the greatest fishing port in the
+world, to learn that Grimsby, with a hundred more fishing sail, is only
+“_one_ of the principal fishing ports” of the United Kingdom. What can
+one do against those brutal British statistics? We think our towns grow
+like weeds, but London seems to grow half such a weed as Chicago in a
+single night.
+
+[Illustration: FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY]
+
+After we were got well into the town, we found ourselves part of an
+immense bicycle parade, with bicyclers of both sexes on their wheels, in
+masks and costumes, Pierrots, and Clowns, and Harlequins and Columbines,
+in a competition for the prettiest and fanciest dress.
+
+When we came to start from the station on our run to London, we
+reflected that there were a great many of these bicyclers, and that they
+would probably crowd us in our third-class compartment. So, as we had
+bought an excellent supper in baskets, such as they send you on the
+trains everywhere in England, and wished to eat it in quiet, we sought
+out the guard who was lurking near for the purpose, and bribed him to
+shut us into that compartment, and not let any one else in. There
+we remained in darkness, with our curtains drawn, and when, near
+train-time, the bicyclers began to swarm about the carriages, we heard
+them demanding admittance to our compartment from our faithful guard,
+if that is the right way to call him. He turned them away with soft
+answers, answers so very soft that we could not make out what he said,
+but he seemed to be inviting them into other compartments, which he
+doubtless pretended were better. The murmurs would die away, and then
+rise again, and from time to time we knew that a baffled bicycler was
+pulling at our door, or vainly bumping against it. We listened with our
+hearts in our mouths; but no one got in, and the train started, and we
+opened our baskets and began to eat and to drink, like two aristocrats
+or plutocrats. What made our inhuman behavior worse was that we were
+really nothing of the kind, but both professed friends of the common
+people. The story might show that when it comes to a question of
+selfishness men are all alike ready to profit by the unjust conditions.
+However, it must be remembered that those people were only bicyclers. If
+we could have conceived of them as masses we should have known them for
+brothers, and let them in, probably.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+
+
+It is only some six or seven hours by train from London to Aberystwyth,
+but if you will look at the names on a map of the Cambrian railways,
+when you begin the Welsh part of your journey, you will seem to be in a
+stranger and farther country than that of Prester John. Pwllheli, Cerrig
+y Drudion, Gwerful Goch, Festiniog, Bryn Eglwys, Llanidloes, Maertwro,
+Carnedd Fibast, Clynog Fwr, Llan-y-Mawddwy Machynlleth, Duffws, are a
+few out of the hundred names in the hills or along the valleys, giving
+the near neighborhood of England an effect of more than mid-Asian
+remoteness. The eye starts at their look; but if the jaw aches at the
+thought of pronouncing them, it is our own wilful orthographical usage
+that is at fault; the words, whose sound the letters faithfully render,
+are music, and they largely record a Christian civilization which was
+centuries old when the Saxons came to drive the Britons into the western
+mountains and to call them strangers in the immemorial home of their
+race. The Britons of the Roman conquest, who became the Welsh of the
+baffled Saxon invaders, and are the Cymry of their own history and
+poetry, still stand five feet four in their stockings, where they have
+stood from the dawn of time, an inexpugnable host of dark little men,
+defying the Saeseneg in their unintelligible, imperishable speech.
+
+
+I
+
+Of course, except in the loneliest and farthest places, they speak
+English as well as Welsh; and they misplace their aspirates, which they
+lost under the Normans as the Saxons did. But this did not happen to
+them by conquest as it did to the Saxons; they were beguiled of their
+h’s when they were cheated with a Welsh-born prince instead of the Welsh
+prince they were promised in the succession of their ancient lines.
+They had been devout Christians, after their manner, in the earliest
+centuries; as the prefix Llan, or Saint, everywhere testifies, the
+country abounded in saints, whose sons inherited their saintship; and
+at the Reformation they became Calvinists as unqualifiedly as their
+kindred, the Bretons, remained Catholics. They have characterized the
+English and Americans with their strong traits in a measure which can
+be dimly traced in the spread of their ten or twenty national names, and
+they have kept even with the most modern ideals quite to the verge of
+co-education in their colleges. It is a fact which no Welshman will
+deny that Cromwell was of Welsh blood. Shakespeare was unquestionably of
+Welsh origin. Henry VII. was that Welsh Twdwr (or Tudor, as the Saeseneg
+misspell it), who set aside the Plantagenet succession, and was the
+grandsire of “the great Elizabeth,” not to boast of Bloody Mary or Henry
+VIII. But if these are not enough, there is the present Chancellor of
+the Exchequer, Mr. Lloyd-George, who is now the chief figure of the
+English cabinet.
+
+The bad name which their own half-countryman, Giraldus Cambrensis, gave
+the Welsh in the twelfth century, clings to them yet in the superstition
+of all Norman-minded and Saxon-minded men, so that the Englishman I met
+on the way from Edinburgh was doubtless speaking racially rather than
+personally when he said that the Welsh were the prize liars of the
+universe. I for my part heard no lies in Wales except those I told
+myself; but as I am of Welsh stock, perhaps my experience is not wholly
+refutive of that Englishman’s position. I can only urge further the
+noted philological fact that the Welsh language is so full of imagery
+that it is almost impossible to express in it the brute veracities in
+which the English speech is so apt. Otherwise I should say that nowhere
+have I been used with a more immediate and constant sincerity than in
+Wales. The people were polite and they were almost always amiable, but
+in English, at least, they did not say the thing that was not; and their
+politeness was without the servile forms from lower to higher which
+rather weary one in England. They said “Yes,” and “No,” but as gently as
+if they had always added “Sir.” If I have it on my conscience to except
+from my sweeping praise of sincerity the expressman at Aberystwyth who
+promised that our baggage should be at our lodgings in an hour, and did
+not bring it in five, I must add that we arrived on the last day of a
+great agricultural fair, when even the New York Transfer Company might
+have given a promise of more than wonted elasticity.
+
+
+II
+
+In the station of Aberystwyth there were about three or four thousand
+Welshmen of the national height, volubly waiting for the trains to bear
+them away to their farms and villages; but they made way most amiably
+for the dismounting travellers, who in our case were led through them by
+the most energetic porter I ever knew. They did not stare down upon us
+from the unseemly altitude of other national statures, and often during
+our stay I saw like crowds of civil men in the street markets who were
+no taller, and sometimes there were women who had not scaled the heights
+reached by our American girls. They would probably have competed fairly
+well with these in the courses of the colleges to which the Welsh send
+their daughters as well as their sons; but I will not pretend that the
+good looks of either the men or women was of the American average.
+I cannot even say that these contemporary ancient Britons had the
+advantage of the toothless English peasantry in the prompt dentistry
+which is our peculiar blessing. In Great Britain, though I must not say
+Ireland, for I have never been there, a few staggering incisors seem
+a formidable equipment of the jaw in lower-class middle life and even
+tender youth. The difference is a tremendous advantage which, if it does
+not make for the highest character in us, will doubtless stand us in
+good stead in any close with the well-toothed Japanese, and when we are
+beaten, our gold-fillings will go far to pay our indemnity.
+
+After all those thousands at the station had departed, there were still
+visitors enough left in Aberystwyth to distend the hotels uncomfortably;
+and the next morning we set out in the pursuit, always interesting and
+alluring, of lodgings. The town seemed to be pretty full of lodgings,
+but as it was the middle of August, and the very height of the season,
+they were full-up in dismaying measure. We found the only one not kept
+by a Welsh woman in the ostensible keeping of an Englishwoman, a veteran
+cockney landlady, but behind her tottering throne reigned a Welsh
+girl, under whose iron rule we fell as if we had been unworthy Saeseneg
+instead of Cymric-fetched Americans. We had rejected other lodgings
+because, though their keepers had promised to provision us, it always
+appeared that we must go out and do the marketing ourselves. I shall
+lastingly regret that we did not submit to this condition, for it would
+have been one of the best means of studying the local life. But we held
+out for the London custom, and before the Welsh Power, which has
+so often made itself felt behind English thrones, could intervene,
+compliance was promised. After that it remained for the Welsh Power to
+make our stay difficult, and our going easy.
+
+[Illustration: THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH]
+
+Otherwise the place was delightful; it was in almost the centre of the
+long curve of the Victoria Terrace, with windows that looked down upon
+the pebbly beach, and over the blue sea to the bluer stretch of the
+Pembrokeshire hills on the south, and the Carnarvonshire hills on the
+north, holding the lovely waters in their shadowy embrace. There was
+not much shipping, and what there was seemed of the pleasure sort that
+parties go down to the sea to be sick in. The long parade was filled
+at most hours with the English who make the place their resort; whose
+bathing began early in the morning and whose flirting continued far
+into the night, with forenoon and afternoon dawdling and dozing on the
+pebbles. At one end of the Terrace rose a prodigious headland, whose
+slope was scaled over with broken slate, like some mammoth heaving from
+the deep and showing an elephantine hide of bluish gray. At the other
+end was the Amusement Pier, with the co-educational college, which is
+part of the University of Wales, and with divers hotels. Somewhat behind
+and beyond were the ruins of one of those castles which the Normans
+planted with a mailed fist at every vantage in Wales, as their sole
+means of holding down the swarming, squirming, fighting little dark
+people of the country. Even then they could not do it, for the Welsh,
+often overrun, were never conquered, as they will tell you themselves if
+you ask them. But Wales is now perhaps the most peaceful country in the
+world. Its prisons for the most part stand empty (it is said), and the
+people, once so turbulent, are as little given to violence as to vice.
+In fact, I once heard a great Welsh scholar declare that in the old
+times it was not the true Welsh who kept up the fighting, either on the
+public or the private scale, but the Scotch and Irish who had found
+a home among them. In any case, it is true that after the Normans had
+planted their castles in Wales to hold the country, it was all they
+could do to hold the castles, and not till their enemies had imagined
+having the English King’s son born in one of them did they bring the
+Welsh under the English crown at last. Even then that uncertain people
+broke from their allegiance now and again; or the Scotch and Irish among
+them did.
+
+
+III
+
+All sorts of sights and sounds might be expected on our Terrace, but
+that which especially warmed the heart of exile in us, and pleased the
+fancy of other sojourners was the appearance, one evening, of a stately
+band of tall men in evening dress and top-hats, with musical instruments
+in their grasp, and heads lifted high above their Welsh following. We
+called the Power behind the Throne to the window in our question and she
+gave a glad cry: “Oh, they’re the Neegurs! They’re the white Neegurs!”
+ and at sight of our compatriotic faces at the pane, these beautiful
+giants took their stand before our house, and burst into the familiar
+music of the log-cabin, the stern-wheel steamboat, and the cornfield, as
+well as the ragtime melodies of later days. It was a rich moment, and
+I know not which joyed in it more, the Welsh Power or the American
+Sufferance.
+
+But here, before I go farther afield, I must note a main difference
+between the Welsh Power and the English slavey to whom she corresponded
+in calling and condition. She was so far educated as to know the
+pseudonym of the friend who came to see us, and to have read his
+writings in the _Welsh Gazette_, treating our proposed triumph in his
+distinction with the fine scorn she used for all our airs. If she had
+been an old-fashioned Yankee Help she could not have been more snubbing;
+but when we had been taught to know our place she was more tolerant, and
+finally took leave of us without rancor.
+
+The notion of the general Welsh education which her intelligence gave us
+was carried indefinitely farther by the grocer’s boy to whom our friend
+presented me one evening, after he had been struggling to make me
+understand what an _englyn_ was. I am able now to explain that it is a
+polite stanza which the Welsh send with a present of fruit or flowers,
+or for a greeting upon any worthy occasion. It is rhymed, sometimes
+at both ends of the lines, and sometimes in the middle of them, and it
+presents all the difficulties of euphony which the indomitable Welsh
+glory in overcoming. But when my friend took me in hand, my ignorance
+was of so dense a surface that he could make no impression on it, and he
+said at last, “Let us go into this grocery. There’s a boy here who will
+_show_ you what an englyn is,” and after I was introduced the kind youth
+did so with pleasure, while he sold candles to one customer, soap to
+another, cheese to another, and herring to another. He first wrote the
+englyn in Welsh, and when I had sufficiently admired it in that tongue
+(for which no atavistic knowledge really served me), he said he would
+put it into English, and he did so. It was then not rhymed at both ends
+or in the middle, but it was rhymed quite enough, and if it had not the
+harp-like sweetness of the original, it was still such a musical stanza
+that I shall always be sorry to have lost it. What I can never lose
+the impression of is the wide-spread literary lore of the common Welsh
+people which the incident suggested. I could not fancy even a Boston
+grocer’s boy doing the like; and perhaps this was an uncommon boy in
+Wales itself. He told me a good deal, which I have mainly forgotten,
+about the state of polite learning in his country and in what honor the
+living bards were held. It seems that in that rhyming and singing little
+land, the poets are still known as of old by their bardic names. As
+Jones, or Evans, or Edwards they have no fame beyond other men, but up
+and down all Wales they are celebrated as this bard or that, and are
+honored according to their poetic worth.
+
+
+IV
+
+After the appearance of the White Neegurs on the Terrace, I could hardly
+have expected any livelier appeal to my American pride, and yet it came,
+one day, when I learned that the line of carriages which I saw passing
+our windows were the vehicles bearing to some public function the
+members of the British Chautauqua. How far the name and idea of
+Chautauqua have since spread there is no saying, but it was the last
+of our national inventions which I should have expected to find in
+Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture was reasonably in its line, and the
+Eisteddfod was not out of keeping with the summer conferences held
+beside our lovely up-State lake. The British Chautauqua, as I saw it,
+was a group of people from all parts of the United Kingdom joined in the
+pursuit of improvement and enjoyment, and they were now here on one of
+their summer outings. They had been invited to a gentleman’s place not
+far from Aberystwyth to view as indubitable a remnant of the Holy Grail
+as now exists, and it was my very good fortune through the kind offices
+of that friend of ours to be invited with them.
+
+It was a blamelessly rainless afternoon, of a sort commoner on the
+western Welsh coast than on other shores of the “rainy isles,” but
+not too common even there; and we drove out of the town through the
+prettiest country of hillside fields and valleys opening to the sea,
+on a road that was fairly dusty in the hot sun. There were cottages,
+grouped and detached, all the way, with gray stone walls and blue slate
+roofs, and in places the children ran out from them with mercenary
+offerings of flowers and song, or with frank pleas for charity direct. I
+yielded with reluctance to the instruction of a Manchester economist in
+my carriage, and denied them, when I would so much rather have abetted
+them in their wicked attempts on our pockets. I remember ruefully still
+that they had voices as sweet and eyes as dark as the children who used
+to chase our wheels in Italy, and I have no doubt they deserved quite as
+well of us as those did.
+
+I got back my spirits when we left our carriages, and I found myself
+walking up a pleasant avenue of wilding trees, with a young Chautauquan
+from Australia who looked as if he might be a young Chautauquan from
+Alabama, tall, and lean, and brown. We fell into talk about the trees,
+and he said how they differed in their green from the sombre gray of his
+native forests; and then he, from that vast far continent of his, spoke
+of the little island where we were, as Home. That has always a strange
+effect for us self-outcasts from the great British roof, and whether it
+makes us smile, or makes us sigh, it never fails to startle us when we
+hear it from colonial lips. The word holds in common kindness Canada and
+India and South Africa and Australia, and it has its pathos in the fact
+that the old mother of these mighty children seems to leave solely to
+them the tenderness that draws them to her in that notion of home.
+
+
+V
+
+There were about fifty of those British Chautauquans, and when they had
+ranged themselves on the grass before the shrubbery of a pleasant lawn,
+backed by a wooded slope, the dignified lady of the house came out with
+a casket in her hand, and put it on a table, and the exercises began.
+Fitly, if the casket really held the sacred relic, they began with
+prayer; then a Welsh soloist followed with a hymn, but whether she
+sang in Welsh or English, I do not remember; I am only sure she sang
+divinely; and then came the speeches. The first of the speeches was by
+our friend, who was the local Unitarian minister, and of a religious
+body not inconsiderable in that Calvinistic Wales. He told us how the
+Holy Grail had been deposited with the monks of Strata Florida, the
+famous old abbey near Aberystwyth; but I forgot who made them this
+trust, unless it was King Arthur’s knights, and I am not sure whether
+the fact is matter of legend or history. What I remember is that when
+the abbey was suppressed by Henry VIII., certain of the escaping monks
+came with the relic to the gentle house where we then were, and placed
+it in the keeping of the family who have guarded it ever since.
+
+[Illustration: ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS]
+
+After our friend, the lady of this house took up the tale, and told in
+words singularly choice and simple the story of the sacred relic as the
+family knew it. I had only once before heard a woman speak, no less a
+woman than our great and dear Julia Ward Howe, and it seemed to me
+that she spoke better than any man; and I must say of the Chautauquans’
+hostess, that day, that if ever the Englishwomen come into their full
+political rights, as they seem sure to do, the traditions of good
+sense and good taste in English public speaking will not pass, but
+will prosper on through their orators. There were touches of poetry,
+nationally Welsh, in what she said, and touches of humor perhaps
+personally Welsh. It seems that the cup had been famed throughout the
+countryside for the miraculous property by which whoever drank from it
+was cured of his or her malady, and it had been passed freely round to
+all sufferers ever since it came into her family’s keeping. That they
+might make doubly sure of the miracle, it was the custom of the sick
+not only to empty the cup, but to nibble a little bit of the wood, and
+swallow that, so that in whatever state the monks of Strata Florida had
+confided it, the vessel was now in the state we saw. Saying this the
+lady opened the casket holding it, and showed us the crescent-shaped rim
+of a wooden bowl, about the bigness of a cocoanut shell; all the rest
+had been consumed by the pious sufferers whom it had restored to health.
+
+I am sorry, after all, to own that this cup is said by some authorities
+not to be the Holy Grail, but a vessel like it carved out of the true
+cross. But even so subordinate a relic is priceless, and as it is no
+longer possible to drink from it, we may hope that the fragment will
+remain indefinitely to after time. When they had wondered at the sight
+of it the Chautauquans and their friend were made free of the charming
+seventeenth-century house, which would be old for this country, but
+which in the taste of that time was rather modern, and looked like the
+casino of some Italian villa. It abounded, as such houses in England do,
+in the pictured faces of the past, and in the memorials which only the
+centuries can leave behind them, but was too graceful to seem rich. “A
+home of ancient peace,” it looked, in its mild gray stone amidst its
+lawns and shrubberies, the larger hold of the gardens and pleasaunces
+through which the Chautauquans followed from it.
+
+
+VI
+
+At Aberystwyth, and elsewhere in Wales, one of the things I noticed was
+the difference of the people from the people over the English border in
+their attitude toward their betters. They might stand only five feet in
+their stockings, but they stood straight, and if they were respectful,
+they were first self-respectful. In our run from Shrewsbury, their
+language first made itself generally heard at Newport, and it increased
+in the unutterable names of the stations westward, the farther we passed
+into their beautiful country, but they had always English enough to be
+civil, though never servile. The country is beautiful in the New
+England measure, but it is of a softer and smaller beauty; it looks more
+caressable; it is like Vermont rather than New Hampshire, and it is
+more like New England than Old England in the greater number of isolated
+farm-houses, from which the girls as well as the boys come to the
+university colleges for learning undreamt of by English farm villagers.
+
+The air was fresh and sweet, and though it seemed to shower wherever
+we stopped to let another train go by on a siding of our single track,
+there was a very passable sense of summer sun. The human type as we
+began to observe it and as we saw it afterward throughout the land was
+not only diminutive, but rather plain and mostly dark, in the men; as to
+the women they were, as they are everywhere, charming, with now and then
+a face of extraordinary loveliness, and nearly always the exquisite West
+of England complexion. In their manners the people could not be more
+amiable than the English, who are as amiable as possible, but they
+seemed brighter and gayer. This remained their effect to the last in
+Aberystwyth, and when one left the Terrace where the English visitors
+superabounded, the Welsh had the whole place to themselves. I would not
+push my conjecture, but it seemed to me that there was an absence of
+the cloying loyalty which makes sojourn in England afflictive to the
+republican spirit; I remember but one shop dedicated to the King’s
+Majesty, with the royal arms over the door, though there may have
+been many others; I am always warning the reader not to take me too
+literally.
+
+Though I was about the streets by day and by dark, I saw no disorderly
+behavior of any kind in the town away from the beach; I do not mean
+there was any by the sea, unless some athletic courtship among the young
+people of the watering-place element was to be accounted so. There was
+not much fashion there, except in a few pretty women who recalled the
+church parade of Hyde Park in their flowery and feathery costumes.
+Back in the town there was no fashion at all, but a general decency
+and comfort of dress. The Welsh costume survives almost solely in the
+picture-postal cards, though perhaps in the hilly fastnesses the women
+still wear the steeple-crowned hats which we associate with the notion
+of witches; when they come to market in Aberystwyth they wear
+hard, shiny black straw hats like the men’s. Amongst the throng of
+Saturday-night shoppers I saw none of the drunkenness that one sees so
+often in Scottish streets, and in English cities, and, I grieve to say,
+even in some New England towns. In the Welsh quarter Sunday was much
+more the Sabbath than it was on the Terrace, where indeed it seemed a
+day of pleasure rather than praise.
+
+
+VII
+
+All the week I had the best intention of hearing the singing in some of
+the Welsh churches, but my goodwill could not carry the day against the
+fear of a sermon which I should not understand. A chance sermon would
+probably have touched upon the education act which was then stirring
+all Dissenting England and Wales to passive resistance, and from
+Lincolnshire to Carnarvonshire was causing the distraint of tables
+and chairs, tools, hams, clocks, clothing, poultry, and crops for the
+payment of such part of the Dissenters’ taxes as would go to the support
+of the Church schools. Possibly it might also have referred to the Walk
+Out of the Welsh Members of Parliament; this was an incident which I
+heard mentioned as of imperial importance, though what caused it or came
+of it I do not know.
+
+Instead of going to church, I strolled up and down the Terrace and
+observed the watering-place life. The town was evidently full, or
+at least all the lodging-houses were, and as it is with the English
+everywhere in their summer resorts, there were men enough to go round,
+so that no poor dear need pine for a mate on that pleasant beach.
+Aberystwyth is therefore to be commended to our overflow of girls,
+though whether there are many eligible noblemen among those youth I have
+not the statistics for saying. All the visitors may have been people
+of rank; I only know that I was told they were mostly from the midland
+cities, and they seemed to be having the good time which people of brief
+outings alone have. The bathing began, as I have noted, very early in
+the day with the men in the briefest possible tights; the women, for
+compensation, wore long trousers with their bathing-skirts, and
+they enhanced the modesty of their effect by the universal use of
+bathing-machines, pushed well away from the curious shore. There was not
+much variety in the visiting English type, but there was here and there
+a sharp imperial accent, as in the two pale little, spindle-legged
+Anglo-Indian boys, with their Hindu ayah, very dark, with sleek dark
+hair, and gleaming eyes in a head not much bigger than a black walnut.
+
+The crescent of the beach was a serried series of hotels and
+lodging-houses, from tip to tip, but back of these were streets
+of homelike, smallish dwellings, that broke rank farther away, and
+scattered about in suburban villas, with trees and flowers and grass
+around them. Beyond stretched, as well as it could stretch among its
+hills, the charming country of fields, and woods, and orchards.
+
+
+VIII
+
+I suppose I did not quite do my duty by the ruins of the Norman castle,
+and I feel that it is now too late to repair my neglect. The stronghold
+was more than once attempted by the Welsh in those wars which make their
+history a catalogue of battles, but it held out Norman till the Normans
+turned English. Owen Glendover took it in 1402, when it was three
+hundred years old, though not yet feeble with age, and in due time one
+of Cromwell’s lieutenants destroyed it. Some very picturesque fragments
+remain to attest the grace and strength of the ancient hold. It is
+near the University College and the Amusement Pier, so that the mere
+sight-seers can do all the ordinary objects of interest at Aberystwyth
+in half a day or half an hour. But we were none of these. We had fallen
+in love with the place, and we would fain have stayed on after the
+week was up for which we had taken our lodging. It appeared from a
+house-to-house canvass, that there was no other lodging to be had in all
+that long crescent of the Terrace; or, if this is incredible, there was
+none we would have. Our successors were impending; and though I think
+our English landlady might have invented something for us at the last
+moment, the Welsh Power was inexorable. Her ideal was lodgers who would
+go out and buy their own provisions, and we had set our faces against
+that. Some one must yield, and the Welsh Power could not; it was not in
+her nature. We were therefore in a manner expelled from Aberystwyth, but
+our banishment was not from all Wales, and this was how we went next to
+Llandudno.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+
+
+Froissart’s saying, if it was Froissart’s, that the English amuse
+themselves sadly antedates that notion of Merry England which is now
+generally rejected by serious observers. I should myself prefer the
+agnostic position, and say that I did not know whether the English were
+glad or not when they looked gay. What I seem to be certain of, but I
+do not say that I am certain, is that they look gayer in their places
+of amusement than we do. I do not mean theatres, or parliaments, or
+music-halls, or lecture-rooms, by places of amusement, but what we
+call summer resorts a little more largely than those resorts which the
+English call watering-places. Of these I should like to take as a type
+the charming summer resort on the coast of North Wales which is called
+Llandudno in print, and in speech several different ways.
+
+
+I
+
+The English simply and frankly, after their blunt nature, call the place
+Landudno, but the Welsh call it, according to one superstition of their
+double _l_ and their French _u_, Thlandidno. According to another, we
+cannot spell it in English at all; but it does not much matter, for
+the last superstition is the ever-delightful but ever-doubtful George
+Borrow’s, who says that the Welsh _ll_ is the same as the Spanish _ll_,
+but who is probably mistaken, most other authorities agreeing that if
+you pronounce it _lhl_ you will come as near it as any Saeseneg need.
+It is a constantly besetting question in Wales, where the prefix _Llan_
+speckles the map all over, owing to that multitude of Saints who peopled
+the country in the times when a Saint’s sons were every one saints, and
+none was of particularly holy, or even good life, because he was known
+for a saint. Like a continental noble, he inherited his title equally
+with all his brothers.
+
+But through whatever orthoepic mazes you search it, Llandudno has every
+claim on your regard and admiration. Like Aberystwyth, its sea front is
+a shallow crescent, but vaster, with a larger town expanding back of it,
+and with loftier and sublimer headlands, at either end, closing it in a
+more symmetrical frame. But I should say that its sea was not so blue,
+or its sky either, and its air was not so soft or dry. Morally it is
+more constantly lively, with a greater and more insistent variety of
+entertainments. For the American its appeal might well have begun with
+the sight of his country’s flag floating over a tennis-ground at the
+neighboring watering-place and purer Welsh town of Rhyl. The approach to
+his affections was confirmed by another American flag displayed before
+one of the chief hotels in Llandudno itself. I learned afterward of the
+landlord that this was because there were several Chicago families in
+his house, and fifteen Americans in all; but why the tennis-ground of
+Rhyl flew our national banner, I do not know to this day. It was
+indeed that gentle moment when our innocent people believed themselves
+peculiarly dear to the English, and might naturally suppose, if from
+Chicago, or Boston, or Denver, that the English would wish to see as
+often as possible the symbol of our successful revolt from the princes
+and principles to which they have religiously adhered.
+
+[Illustration: LLANDUDNO--THE CITY AND HARBOR]
+
+Both that home of the patriotic Chicago families, and the other best
+hotel were too full for us, and after a round of the second-best we
+decided for lodgings, hoping as usual that they would bring us nearer
+the native life. The best we could get, facing the sea midway of the
+crescent, were not exactly Welsh in their keeping. The landladies were,
+in fact, two elderly Church-of-England sisters from Dublin, who had
+named their house out of a novel they had read. They said they believed
+the name was Italian, and the reader shall judge if it were so from its
+analogue of Osier Wood. The maids in the house, however, were very truly
+and very wickedly Welsh: two tough little ponies of girls, who tied
+their hair up with shoe-strings, and were forbidden, when about their
+work, to talk Welsh together, lest they should speak lezing of those
+Irish ladies. The rogues were half English, but the gentle creature
+who served our table was wholly Welsh; small, sweet-voiced, dark-eyed,
+intelligent, who suffered from the universal rheumatism of the British
+Isles, but kept steadily to her duty, and accepted her fate with
+patience and even cheerfulness. She waited on several other tables, for
+the house was full of lodgers, all rather less permanent than ourselves,
+who were there for a fortnight; we found our landladies hoping, when we
+said we were going, to have had us with them through the winter.
+
+
+II
+
+Our fellow-lodgers were quiet people of divers degrees, except perhaps
+the highest, unless the nobility bring boiled hams with them when they
+visit the seaside. The boiled ham of the drawing-room floor was frankly
+set out on the hall table, where it seemed to last a week, or at least
+till the lodgers went away. There was much coming and going, for it was
+the height of the season, with the prices at flood tide. We paid six
+guineas a week for three bedrooms and a sitting-room; but our landladies
+owned it was dear. An infirm and superannuated sideboard served for a
+dressing-table in one room; in others the heavier pieces of furniture
+stood sometimes on four legs, sometimes on three. We had the advantage
+of two cats on the back fence, and a dog in the back yard; but if the
+controversy between them was carried on in Welsh, it is no wonder we
+never knew what it was about.
+
+Our hostesses said the Welsh were dirty housekeepers: “At least _we_
+think so,” but I am bound to say their own cooking was very good; and
+not being Welsh our hostesses consented to market for us, except in the
+article of Spanish melons: these I bought myself of increasing cost and
+size. When I alleged, the second morning, that the melon then sold
+me for sixpence had been sold me by another boy for fourpence the day
+before, my actual Cymric youth said, “Then he asked you too little,”
+ which seemed a _non sequitur_ but was really an unexpected stroke of
+logic.
+
+It was the utmost severity used with me by my co-racials in Llandudno.
+They were in the great majority of the permanent inhabitants, but they
+were easily outnumbered among the pleasurers by the Saeseneg, whose
+language prevailed, so that a chance word of Welsh now and then was all
+that I heard in the streets. Some faint stirrings of ambition to follow
+the language as far as a phrase-book would lead were not encouraged by
+the kindly bookseller who took my money for it; and I did not go on. It
+is a loss for me in literature which translation cannot supply, for
+the English lovers of Welsh poetry, after praising it to the skies,
+are never able to produce anything which is not direly mechanical and
+vacuous. The native charm somehow escapes them; the grace beyond the
+reach of art remains with the Cymric poets who have resources for its
+capture unknown to their English admirers. George Borrow seems the worst
+failure in this sort, and the worst offender in giving his reader the
+hopes he never fulfils, so that his _Wild Wales_ is a desert of blighted
+literary promises. I believe that the merit of Welsh poetry dwells
+largely, perhaps overlargely, in its intricate technique, and in the
+euphonic changes which leave the spoken word ready for singing almost
+without the offices of the composer.
+
+
+III
+
+One of the great musical contests, the yearly national Eisteddfod, was
+taking place that year at the neighboring town of Rhyl, but I did not go
+to hear it, not being good for a week’s music without intermission.
+At Llandudno there was only the music of the Pierrots and the Niggers,
+which those simple-hearted English have borrowed, the one from
+France and the other from these States. Their passion for our colored
+minstrelsy is, in fact, something pathetic. They like Pierrots well
+enough, and Pierrots _are_ amusing, there is no doubt of it; but they
+dote upon Niggers, as they call them with a brutality unknown among us
+except to the vulgarest white men and boys, and the negroes themselves
+in moments of exasperation. Negro minstrelsy is almost extinct in the
+land of its birth, but in the land of its adoption it flourishes in the
+vigor of undying youth: no watering-place is genuine without it. Bands
+of Niggers haunt the streets and suburbs of London, and apparently every
+high day or holiday throughout the British Islands requires the stamp of
+their presence as a nostrum requires the name of the patentee blown in
+the bottle. The decay of their gay science began among us with the fall
+of slavery, and the passing of the old plantation life; but as these
+never existed in Great Britain the English version of negro minstrelsy
+is not affected by their disappearance. It is like the English tradition
+of the Red Skins, which has all but vanished from our superstition, but
+remains as powerful as ever in the constant fancy of those islanders.
+
+The English like their Niggers very, very black, and as their Niggers
+are English they know how to gratify the national preference: such a
+spread of scarlet lips over half the shining sable face is known nowhere
+else in nature or art; and it must have been in despair of rivalling
+their fellow-minstrels that the small American troupe we saw at
+Aberystwyth went to the opposite extreme and frankly appeared as the
+White Neegurs. At Llandudno the blackness of the Niggers was absolute,
+so that it almost darkened the day as they passed our lodging, along the
+crescent of the beach on their way to their open-air theatre beyond it.
+They were followed by a joyous retinue of boys and girls, tradesmen’s
+apprentices, donkeys, bath-chairs, and all the movable gladness of the
+watering-place, to the music of their banjos and the sound of their
+singing. They were going to a fold of the foot-hills called the Happy
+Valley, bestowed on the public for such pleasures by the local nobleman
+whose title is given to a principal street, and to other points and
+places, I suppose out of the public pride and gratitude. It is a
+charming amphitheatre overlooked by the lofty tops around, and there
+on the green slope the Niggers had set up their stage, and ranged the
+spectators’ chairs in the classification of first, second, and third so
+dear to the British soul. There they cracked their jokes, and there they
+sang their songs; the songs were newer than the jokes, but they were
+both kinds delivered with a strong Cockney accent, and without an
+aspirate in its place. But it was all richly acceptable to the audience,
+who laughed and cheered and joined in the chorus when asked. Here,
+as everywhere, the crowd delighted equally in songs of the sloppiest
+sentimentality and of humor nighest indecency.
+
+[Illustration: LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME’S NECK]
+
+On the afternoon of our visit the good lady next me could not contain
+her peculiar pride in the entertainment, and confided that she knew the
+leader of the troupe, who was an old friend of her husband’s. It was
+indeed a time and place that invited to expansion. Nothing could have
+been friendlier and livelier than the spectacle of the spectators spread
+over the grassy slope, or sublimer than the rise of the hills around, or
+more enchanting than the summer sea, with the large and little shipping
+on it, and the passenger-steamers going and coming from Liverpool and
+all the points in the region round. The two headlands which mark the
+limits of the beautiful beach, Great Orme’s Head, and Little Orme’s
+Head, are both of a nobleness tempered to kindliness by the soft and
+manageable beauty of their forms. I never got quite so far as Little
+Orme’s Head, for it was full two miles from our lodging, and a fortnight
+was not long enough for the journey, but with Great Orme’s Head I was on
+terms of very tolerable intimacy. A road of the excellence peculiar to
+England passes round on the chin, so to speak, and though I never went
+the length of it, I went far enough to know the majesty of the seaward
+prospect. From the crown of the Head there is a view of perhaps all the
+mountains in Wales, which from this point appears entirely composed of
+mountains, blue, blue and enchantingly fair. On the townward side you
+may descend into the Happy Valley, as we did, and find always a joyous
+crowd listening to the Niggers. If, after some doubt of your way, you
+have the favor of a nice boy and an intelligent collie dog, whom the boy
+is helping herd home the evening cows of a pleasant farm, you will
+have a charming glimpse of the local civilization; and perhaps you will
+notice that the cows do not pay much attention to the boy, but obey the
+dog implicitly; it is their Old World convention.
+
+
+IV
+
+From another side we had ascended the mountain by the tram line which
+climbs it to the top, and at every twist and turn lavishes some fresh
+loveliness of landscape upon your vision. Near by, we noticed many
+depressions and sinkages in the ground, and a conversable man in
+well-oiled overalls who joined us at a power-house, said it was from the
+giving way of the timbers in the disused copper-mines. Were they very
+old, we asked, and he said they had not been worked for forty years; but
+this, when you come to think of the abandoned Roman mines yet deeper
+in the hill, was a thing of yesterday. The man in the oily overalls
+had evidently not come to think of it, but he was otherwise a very
+intelligent mechanic, and of a hospitable mind, like all the rest of our
+chance acquaintance in Great Britain. I do not know that I like to think
+of those Roman mines myself, where it is said the sea now surges back
+and forth: they must have been worked by British slaves, who may be
+fancied climbing purblindly out when the legions left Britain, and not
+joining very loudly in the general lamentation at their withdrawal,
+but probably tempering the popular grief with the reflection that the
+heathen Saxons could not be much worse.
+
+The hill-top was covered with the trippers who seem perpetually
+holidaying on their island, and who were always kind to their children
+when they had them, and to each other when they had not. They were
+commonly in couples, very affectionate and inoffensively young. They
+wandered about, and from time to time went and had tea at one of the
+tea-houses which are always at hand over there. Except the view there
+was not much to see; the ways were rough; now and then you came to a
+pink cottage or a white one where the peasantry, again, sold tea. At one
+place in our walk over the occiput of Great Orme’s Head into the Happy
+Valley in its bosom, we fell a prey to a conspiracy of boys selling
+mignonette: it appeared to be a mignonette trust, or syndicate,
+confining its commerce to that flower.
+
+I have no other statistics to offer concerning business on Great Orme’s
+Head, or indeed in all Llandudno. One of the chief industries seemed to
+be coaching, for a score of delightful places are to be easily reached
+by the stages always departing from the hotels on the Parade. There was
+no particularly noticeable traffic in leek, though I suppose that as I
+did not see the national emblem in any Welshman’s hat--to be sure, it
+was not St. David’s Day--it must have been boiling in every Welshman’s
+pot. I am rather ashamed to be joining, even at this remove, in the poor
+English joking which goes on about the Welsh, quite as much as about the
+Scotch, the Irish having become too grave a matter for joking. There
+are little burlesque manuals making merry with the language and its
+agglutinative prolixity, which I shall certainly not quote; and
+there are postal-cards representing Welsh dames drinking tea in tall
+witch-hats, with one of them saying: “I wass enjoying myself shocking,
+look you.” There was, of course, nothing serious in this joking; the
+Welsh, who have all the small commerce in their hands, gladly sold the
+manuals and postals, and I did not see one Englishman laughing over
+them.
+
+The Saeseneg visitors rather amused themselves with the sea and the
+resources of the beach and the bathing. As contrasted with the visitors
+at Aberystwyth, so distinctly in the earlier and later stages of
+love-making, I should say those at Llandudno were domestic: fathers and
+mothers who used the long phalanx of bathing-machines appointed to their
+different sexes, and their children who played in the sand. I thought
+the children charming, and I contributed tuppence to aid in the repair
+of the sand castle of two nice little boys which had fallen down; it now
+seems strange that I should have been asked for a subscription, but in
+England subscriptions spare nobody; though I wonder if two such nice
+little boys would have come to me for money in America. Besides the
+entertainment of lying all afternoon on the beach, or sitting beside it
+in canopied penny chairs, there was more active diversion for all ages
+and sexes in the circus prevailing somewhere in the background,
+and advertising itself every afternoon by a procession of six young
+elephants neatly carrying each in his trunk the tail of the elephant
+before him. There were also the delightful shows of the amusement pier
+where one could go and see Pierrots to one’s heart’s content, if one can
+ever get enough of Pierrots; I never can.
+
+[Illustration: THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO]
+
+Besides all these daytime things there were two very good theatres, at
+one of which I saw Mr. Barrie’s _Little Mary_ given better than in New
+York (that was easy), and at the other a comic opera, with a bit of
+comedy or tragedy in a stage-box, not announced in the bills. The
+audience was otherwise decorous enough to be composed of Welsh Baptist
+elders and their visiting friends, but in this box there were two young
+men in evening dress, scuffling with a young woman in dinner décolletée,
+and what appeared to be diamonds in her ears. They were trying,
+after what seems the convention of English seaside flirtation, to get
+something out of her hand, and allowing her successfully to resist them;
+and their playful contest went on through a whole act to the distraction
+of the spectators, who did not seem greatly scandalized. It suggested
+the misgiving that perhaps bad people came to Llandudno for their summer
+outing as well as good; but there was no interference by the police or
+the management with this robust side-show. Were the actors in the scene,
+all or any of them, too high in rank to be lightly molested in their
+lively event; or were they too low? Perhaps they were merely tipsy,
+but all the same their interlude was a contribution to the evening’s
+entertainment which would not have been so placidly accepted in, say,
+Atlantic City, or Coney Island, or even Newport, where people are said
+to be more accustomed to the caprices of society persons, and more
+indulgent of their whims.
+
+
+V
+
+A more improving, and on the whole more pleasing, phase of the
+indigenous life, and also more like a phase of our own, showed itself
+the day of our visit to Conway, a little way from Llandudno. There, on
+our offering to see the ruins of the wonderful and beautiful old castle,
+we were met at the entrance with a demand for an exceptional shilling
+gate money, because of the fair for the local Wesleyan Chapel which was
+holding in the interior. What seemed at first a hardship turned out a
+chance which we would not have missed on any account. There was a large
+tent set up in the old castle court, and a table spread with home-made
+dainties of many sorts, and waited upon by gentle maids and matrons who
+served one with tea or whatever else one liked, all for that generously
+inclusive shilling. They were Welsh, they told us, and they were
+speaking their language to right and left of us, while they were so
+courteous to us in English. It was quite like a church fair in some
+American village, where, however, it could not have had the advantage
+of a ruined Norman castle for its scene, and where it would not have
+provided a range for target practice with air-guns, or grounds for
+running and jumping.
+
+The place was filled with people young and old who were quietly amusing
+themselves and were more taken up with the fair than with the castle.
+I must myself comparatively slight the castle in the present study of
+people rather than places, though I may note that if there is any
+more interesting ruin in the world, I am satisfied with this which it
+surpasses. Besides its beauty, what strikes one most is its perfect
+adaptation to the original purpose of palace and fortress for which the
+Normans planned their strongholds in Wales. The architect built not only
+with a constant instinct of beauty, but with unsurpassable science and
+skill. The skill and the science have gone the way of the need of them,
+but the beauty remains indelible and as eternal as the hunger for it
+in the human soul. Conway castle is not all a ruin, even as a fortress,
+however. Great part of it still challenges decay, and is so entire in
+its outward shape that it has inspired the railway running under its
+shoulder to attempt a conformity of style in the bridge approaching it,
+but without enabling it to an equal effect of grandeur. One would as
+soon the bridge had not tried.
+
+All Conway is worthy, within its ancient walls, of as much devotion as
+one can render it in the rain, which begins as soon as you leave the
+castle. The walls climb from the waters to the hills, and the streets
+wander up and down and seem to the stranger mainly to seek that
+beautiful old Tudor house, Plas Mawr, which like the castle is without
+rival in its kind. It was full of reeking and streaming sight-seers,
+among whom one could easily find one’s self incommoded without feeling
+one’s self a part of the incommodation, but in spite of them there was
+the assurance of comfort as well as splendor in the noble old mansion,
+such as the Elizabethan houses so successfully studied. In the
+dining-room a corner of the mantel has its sandstone deeply worn
+away, and a much-elbowed architect, who was taking measurements of the
+chimney, agreed that this carf was the effect of the host or the butler
+flying to the place and sharpening his knife for whatever haunch of
+venison or round of beef was toward. It was a fine memento of the
+domestic past, and there was a secret chamber where the refugees of this
+cause or that in other times were lodged in great discomfort. Besides,
+there was a ghost which was fairly crowded out of its accustomed
+quarters, where so far from being able to walk, it would have had much
+ado to stand upright by flattening itself against the wall.
+
+
+VI
+
+In fact, there was not much more room that day in the Plas Mawr, than in
+the Smallest House in the World, which is the next chiefest attraction
+of Conway. This, too, was crammed with damp enthusiasts, passionately
+eager to sign their names in the guest-book. They scarcely left space in
+the sitting-room of ten by twelve feet for the merry old hostess selling
+photographs and ironically inviting her visitors’ guests to a glimpse
+of the chamber overhead, or so much of it as the bed allowed to be seen.
+She seemed not to believe in her abode as a practicable tenement, and
+could not be got to say that she actually lived in it; as to why it was
+built so small she was equally vague. But there it was, to like or to
+leave, and there, not far off, was the “briny beach” where the Walrus
+and the Carpenter walked together,--
+
+     “And wept like anything to see
+      Such quantities of sand.”
+
+For it was in Conway, as history or tradition is, that _Through the
+Looking-Glass_ was written.
+
+There are very few places in those storied British Isles which are
+not hallowed by some association with literature; but I suppose that
+Llandudno is as exempt as any can be, and I will not try to invoke any
+dear and honored shade from its doubtful obscurity. We once varied the
+even tenor of our days there by driving to Penmaenmawr, and wreaking our
+love of literary associations so far as we might by connecting the place
+with the memory of Gladstone, who was literary as well as political. We
+thought with him that Penmaenmawr was “the most charming watering-place
+in Wales,” and as you drive into the place, the eye of faith will
+detect the house, on the right, in which he spent many happy summers. We
+contented ourselves with driving direct to the principal hotel, where
+I know not what kept us from placing ourselves for life. We had tea and
+jam en the pretty lawn, and the society of a large company of wasps of
+the yellow-jacket variety, which must have been true Welsh wasps, as
+peaceful as they were musical, and no interloping Scotch or Irish, for
+they did not offer to attack us, but confined themselves altogether to
+our jam: to be sure, we thought best to leave it to them.
+
+[Illustration: CONWAY CASTLE]
+
+It is said that the purple year is not purpler at any point on the
+southernmost shores of England than it is at Llandudno. In proof of the
+mildness of its winter climate, the presence of many sorts of tender
+evergreens is alleged, and the persistence of flowers in blooming from
+Christmas to Easter. But those who have known the deceitful habits of
+flowers on the Riviera, where they bloom in any but an arctic degree of
+cold, will not perhaps hurry to Llandudno much later than November.
+All the way to Penmaenmawr the flowers showed us what they could do in
+summer, whether in field or garden, and there was one beautiful hill
+on which immense sweeps and slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather
+boldly stretched separately, or mingled their dyes in the fearlessness
+of nature when she spurns the canons of art. I suppose there is no
+upholsterer or paperhanger who would advise mixing or matching yellow
+and purple in the decoration of a room, but here the outdoor effect rapt
+the eye in a transport of delight. It was indeed a day when almost any
+arrangement of colors would have pleased.
+
+
+VII
+
+It is not easy in that much summer-resorted region to get at the country
+in other than its wilder moods; it is either town or mountain; but now
+and then one found one’s self among harvest-fields, where the yield of
+wheat and oats was far heavier than with us, either because the soil was
+richer or the tilth thorougher. The farms indeed looked very fertile,
+and the farmhouses very alluringly clean and neat, at least on the
+outside. They were not gray, as in the West of England, or brick as
+in the Southeast, but were of stone whitewashed, and the roofs were of
+slate, and not thatch or tile. As I have noted, they were not so much
+gathered into villages as in England, and again, as I have noted, it
+is out of such houses that the farmers’ boys and girls go to the
+co-educational colleges of the Welsh University. It is still the
+preference of the farmers that their sons should be educated for the
+ministry, which in that country of multiplied dissents has pulpits for
+every color of contrary-mindedness, as well as livings of the not yet
+disestablished English Church. It is not indeed the English Church in
+speech. The Welsh will have their service and their sermon in their own
+tongue, and when an Oxford or Cambridge man is given a Welsh living, he
+must do what he can to conform to the popular demand. It is said that
+in one case, where the incumbent long held out against the parish,
+he compromised by reading the service in Welsh with the English
+pronunciation. But the Welsh churches are now supplied with
+Welsh-speaking clergy, though whether it is well for the Welsh to cling
+so strongly to their ancient speech is doubted by many Welshmen. These
+hold that it cramps and dwarfs the national genius; but in the mean time
+in Ireland the national genius, long enlarged to our universal English,
+offers the strange spectacle of an endeavor to climb back into its
+Gaelic shell.
+
+[Illustration: PLAS MAWR]
+
+I do not know whether an incident of my experience in coming from
+Chester to Llandudno is to be offered as an illustration of Welsh
+manners or of English manners. A woman of the middle rank, certainly
+below gentlewoman, but very personable and well dressed, got into our
+carriage where there was no seat for her. She was no longer young, but
+she was not so old as the American who offered her his seat. She refused
+it, but consented to sit on the hand-bag and rug which he arranged for
+her, and so remained till she left the train, while a half-grown boy
+and several young men kept their countenances and their places, not
+apparently dreaming of offering her a seat, or if they thought of her
+at all, thought she was well punished for letting the guard crowd her
+in upon us. By her stature and complexion she was undoubtedly Welsh, and
+these youth from theirs were as undoubtedly English. Perhaps, then, the
+incident had better be offered as an illustration of Welsh and English
+manners combined.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER
+
+
+Nothing is so individual in any man as the peculiar blend of
+characteristics which he has inherited from his racial ancestries. The
+Englishman, who leaves the stamp of the most distinct personality upon
+others, is the most mixed, the most various, the most relative of all
+men. He is not English except as he is Welsh, Dutch, and Norman, with
+“a little Latin and less Greek” from his earliest visitors and invaders.
+This conception of him will indefinitely simplify the study of his
+nature if it is made in the spirit of the frank superficiality which I
+propose to myself. After the most careful scrutiny which I shall be
+able to give him, he will remain, for every future American, the
+contradiction, the anomaly, the mystery which I expect to leave him.
+
+
+I
+
+No error of the Englishman’s latest invader is commoner than the notion,
+which perhaps soonest suggests itself, that he is a sort of American,
+tardily arriving at our kind of consciousness, with the disadvantages
+of an alien environment, after apparently hopeless arrest in unfriendly
+conditions. The reverse may much more easily be true; we may be a sort
+of Englishmen, and the Englishman, if he comes to us and abides with
+us, may become a sort of American. But that is the affair of a possible
+future, and the actual Englishman is certainly not yet any sort of
+American, unless, indeed, for good and for bad, he is a better sort
+of Bostonian. He does not even speak the American language, whatever
+outlandish accent he uses in speaking his own. It may be said, rather
+too largely, too loosely, that the more cultivated he is, the more he
+will speak like a cultivated American, until you come to the King,
+or the Royal Family, with whom a strong German accent is reported to
+prevail. The Englishman may write American, if he is a very good
+writer, but in no case does he spell American. He prefers, as far as
+he remembers it, the Norman spelling, and, the Conqueror having said
+“_geôle_,” the Conquered print “gaol,” which the American invader must
+pronounce “jail,” not “gayol.”
+
+The mere mention of the Royal Family advances us to the most marked of
+all the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is
+not superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned
+principle, but a passion induced by the general volition. Whatever
+it is, it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly
+pervasive of the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago--say, fifteen
+or twenty--it was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known
+at all with many in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges, or
+the time of the happy-go-lucky sailor William; in the earlier time of
+Victoria, it was a chivalrous devotion among the classes, and with the
+masses an affection which almost no other sovereign has inspired. I
+should not be going farther than some Englishmen if I said that her
+personal character saved the monarchy; when she died there was not a
+vestige of the republican dream which had remained from a sentiment
+for “the free peoples of antiquity” rather than from the Commonwealth.
+Democracy had indeed effected itself in a wide-spread socialism, but the
+kingship was safe in the hearts of the Queen’s subjects when the Prince
+of Wales, who was the first of them, went about praising loyalty as
+prime among the civic virtues and duties. The notion took the general
+fancy, and met with an acceptance in which the old superstition of kings
+by divine right was resuscitated with the vulgar. One of the vulgar
+lately said to an American woman who owned that we did not yield an
+equal personal fealty to all our Presidents, “Oh yes, but you know that
+it is only your _people_ that choose the President, but _God_ gave us
+the King.” Nothing could be opposed to a belief so simple, as in the
+churches of the eldest faith the humble worshipper could not well be
+told that the picture or the statue of his adoration was not itself
+sacred. In fact, it is not going too far, at least for a very
+adventurous spirit, to say that loyalty with the English is a sort of
+religious principle. What is with us more or less a joke, sometimes
+bad, sometimes good, namely, our allegiance to the powers that be in the
+person of the Chief Magistrate, is with them a most serious thing, at
+which no man may smile without loss.
+
+I was so far from wishing myself to smile at it, that I darkled most
+respectfully about it, without the courage to inquire directly into the
+mystery. If it was often on my tongue to ask, “What is loyalty? How
+did you come by it? Why are you loyal?”--I felt that it would be
+embarrassing when it would not be offensive, and I should vainly plead
+in excuse that this property of theirs mystified me the more because it
+seemed absolutely left out of the American nature. I perceived that in
+the English it was not less really present because it was mixed, or used
+to be mixed, with scandal that the alien can do no more than hint at.
+That sort of abuse has long ceased, and if one were now to censure the
+King, or any of the Royal Family, it would be felt to be rather ill
+bred, and quite unfair, since royalty is in no position to reply to
+criticism. Even the Socialists would think it ill-mannered, though
+in their hearts, if not in their sleeves, they must all the while be
+smiling at the notion of anything sacred in the Sovereign.
+
+[Illustration: A PRESENTATION AT COURT]
+
+
+II
+
+Loyalty, like so many other things in England, is a convention to which
+the alien will tacitly conform in the measure of his good taste or his
+good sense. It is not his affair, and in the mean time it is a most
+curious and interesting spectacle; but it is not more remarkable,
+perhaps, than the perfect acquiescence in the aristocratic forms of
+society which hedge the King with their divinity. We think that family
+counts for much with ourselves, in New England or in Virginia; but it
+counts for nothing at all in comparison with the face value at which it
+is current in England. We think we are subject to our plutocracy, when
+we are very much out of humor or out of heart, in some such measure as
+the commoners of England are subject to the aristocracy; but that is
+nonsense. A very rich man with us is all the more ridiculous for his
+more millions; he becomes a byword if not a hissing; he is the meat of
+the paragrapher, the awful example of the preacher; his money is found
+to smell of his methods. But in England, the greater a nobleman is,
+the greater his honor. The American mother who imagines marrying her
+daughter to an English duke, cannot even imagine an English
+duke--say, like him of Devonshire, or him of Northumberland, or him
+of Norfolk--with the social power and state which wait upon him in his
+duchy and in the whole realm; and so is it in degree down to the latest
+and lowest of the baronets, and of those yet humbler men who have been
+knighted for their merits and services in medicine, in literature, in
+art. The greater and greatest nobles are established in a fear which is
+very like what the fear of God used to be when the common people feared
+Him; and, though they are potent political magnates, they mainly rule
+as the King himself does, through the secular reverence of those beneath
+them for their titles and the visible images of their state. They are
+wealthy men, of course, with so much substance that, when one now and
+then attempts to waste it, he can hardly do so; but their wealth alone
+would not establish them in the popular regard. His wealth does no
+such effect for Mr. Astor in England; and mere money, though it is much
+desired by all, is no more venerated in the person of its possessor than
+it is with us. It is ancestry, it is the uncontested primacy of families
+first in their place, time out of mind, that lays its resistless hold
+upon the fancy and bows the spirit before it. By means of this comes
+the sovereign effect in the political as well as the social state; for,
+though the people vote into or out of power those who vote other people
+into or out of the administration, it is always--or so nearly always
+that the exception proves the rule--family that rules, from the King
+down to the least attaché of the most unimportant embassy. No doubt many
+of the English are restive under the fact; and, if one had asked their
+mind about it, one might have found them frank enough; but, never asking
+it, it was with amusement that I heard said once, as if such a thing had
+never occurred to anybody before, “Yes, isn’t it strange that those few
+families should keep it all among themselves!” It was a slender female
+voice, lifted by a young girl with an air of pensive surprise, as at a
+curious usage of some realm of faery.
+
+
+III
+
+England is in fact, to the American, always a realm of faery, in its
+political and social constitution. It must be owned, concerning the
+government by family, that it certainly seems to work well. That
+justifies it, so far as the exclusion of the immense majority from the
+administration of their own affairs can be justified by anything;
+though I hold that the worst form of graft in office is hardly less
+justifiable: that is, at least, one of the people picking their pockets.
+But it is the universal make-believe behind all the practical virtue of
+the state that constitutes the English monarchy a realm of faery. The
+whole population, both the great and the small, by a common effort of
+the will, agree that there is a man or a woman of a certain line who
+can rightfully inherit the primacy amongst them, and can be dedicated
+through this right to live the life of a god, to be so worshipped and
+flattered, so cockered about with every form of moral and material
+flummery, that he or she may well be more than human not to be made a
+fool of. Then, by a like prodigious stroke of volition, the inhabitants
+of the enchanted island universally agree that there is a class of them
+which can be called out of their names in some sort of title, bestowed
+by some ancestral or actual prince, and can forthwith be something
+different from the rest, who shall thenceforth do them reverence, them
+and their heirs and assigns, forever. By this amusing process, the realm
+of faery is constituted, a thing which could not have any existence in
+nature, yet by its existence in fancy becomes the most absolute of human
+facts.
+
+It is not surprising that, in the conditions which ensue, snobbishness
+should abound; the surprising thing would be if it did not abound. Even
+with ourselves, who by a seven years’ struggle burst the faery dream a
+century ago, that least erected spirit rears its loathly head from the
+dust at times, and in our polite press we can read much if we otherwise
+see nothing of its subtle influence. But no evil is without its
+compensating good, and the good of English snobbishness is that it
+has reduced loyalty, whether to the prince or to the patrician, from a
+political to a social significance. That is, it does so with the upper
+classes; with the lower, loyalty finds expression in an unparalleled
+patriotism. An Englishman of the humble or the humbler life may know
+very well that he is not much in himself; but he believes that England
+stands for him, and that royalty and nobility stand for England. Both
+of these, there, are surrounded by an atmosphere of reverence wholly
+inconceivable to the natives of a country where there are only
+millionaires to revere.
+
+
+IV
+
+The most curious thing is that the persons in the faery dream seem to
+believe it as devoutly as the simplest and humblest of the dreamers. The
+persons in the dream apparently take themselves as seriously as if there
+were or could be in reality kings and lords. They could not, of course,
+do so if they were recently dreamed, as they were, say, in the France
+of the Third Empire. There, one fancies, these figments must have always
+been smiling in each other’s faces when they were by themselves. But
+the faery dream holds solidly in England because it is such a very old
+dream. Besides, the dream does not interfere with the realities; it even
+honors them. If a man does any great thing in England, the chief figure
+of the faery dream recognizes his deed, stoops to him, lifts him up
+among the other figures, and makes him part of the dream forever. After
+that he has standing, such as no man may have with us for more than that
+psychological moment, when all the papers cry him up, and then everybody
+tries to forget him. But, better than this, the dream has the effect, if
+it has not the fact, of securing every man in his place, so long as
+he keeps to it. Nowhere else in the world is there so much personal
+independence, without aggression, as in England. There is apparently
+nothing of it in Germany; in Italy, every one is so courteous and kind
+that there is no question of it; in the French Republic and in our own,
+it exists in an excess that is molestive and invasive; in England alone
+does it strike the observer as being of exactly the just measure.
+
+Very likely the observer is mistaken, and in the present case he will
+not insist. After all, even the surface indications in such matters are
+slight and few. But what I noted was that, though the simple and humble
+have to go to the wall, and for the most part go to it unkicking, in
+England they were, on their level, respectfully and patiently entreated.
+At a railroad junction one evening, when there was a great hurrying up
+stairs and down, and a mad seeking of wrong trains by right people, the
+company’s servants who were taking tickets, and directing passengers
+this way and that, were patiently kind with futile old men and women,
+who came up, in the midst of their torment, and pestered them with
+questions as to the time when trains that had not arrived would leave
+after they did arrive. I shuddered to think what would have at least
+verbally happened to such inquirers with us; but, there, not only their
+lives but their feelings were safe, and they could go away with such
+self-respect as they had quite intact.
+
+
+V
+
+In no country less good-hearted than England could anything so
+wrong-headed as the English baggage system be suffered. But, there,
+passengers of all kinds help the porters to sort their trunks from other
+people’s trunks, on arrival at their stations, and apparently think it
+no hardship. The porters, who do not seem especially inspired persons,
+have a sort of guiding instinct in the matter, and wonderfully seldom
+fail to get the things together for the cab, or to get them off the cab,
+and, duly labelled, into the luggage-van. Once, at a great junction,
+my porter seemed to have missed my train, and after vain but not
+unconsidered appeals to the guard, I had to start without it. At
+the next station, the company telegraphed back at its own cost the
+voluminous message of my anxiety and indignation, and I was assured that
+the next train would bring my valise from Crewe to Edinburgh. When I
+arrived at Edinburgh, I casually mentioned my trouble to a guard whom I
+had not seen before. He asked how the bags were marked, and then he said
+they had come with us. My porter had run with them to my train, but in
+despair of getting to my car with his burden, had put them into the
+last luggage-van, and all I had to do was now to identify them at my
+journey’s end.
+
+Why one does not, guiltily or guiltlessly, claim other people’s baggage,
+I do not know; but apparently it is not the custom. Perhaps in this, the
+deference for any one within his rights, peculiar to the faery dream,
+operates the security of the respective owners of baggage that could
+otherwise easily be the general prey. While I saw constant regard paid
+for personal rights, I saw only one case in which they were offensively
+asserted. This was in starting from York for London, when we attempted
+to take possession of a compartment we had paid for from the nearest
+junction, in order to make certain of it. We found it in the keeping
+of a gentleman who had turned it from a non-smoking into a smoking
+compartment, and bestrewn it with his cigar ashes. When told by the
+porters that we had engaged the compartment, he refused to stir, and
+said that he had paid for his seat, and he should not leave it till he
+was provided with another. In vain they besought him to consider our
+hard case, in being kept out of our own, and promised him another place
+as good as the one he held. He said that he would not believe it till he
+saw it, and as he would not go to see it, and it could not be brought to
+him, there appeared little chance of our getting rid of him. I thought
+it best to let him and the porters fight it out among themselves. When
+a force of guards appeared, they were equally ineffective against
+the intruder, who could not, or did not, say that he did not know the
+compartment was engaged. Suddenly, for no reason, except that he had
+sufficiently stood, or sat, upon his rights, he rose, and the others
+precipitated themselves upon his hand-baggage, mainly composed of
+fishing-tackle, such as a gentleman carries who has been asked to
+somebody’s fishing, and bore it away to another part of the train. They
+left one piece behind, and the porter who came back for it was radiantly
+smiling, as if the struggle had been an agreeable exercise, and he spoke
+of his antagonist without the least exasperation; evidently, he regarded
+him as one who had justly defended himself from corporate aggression;
+his sympathies were with him rather than with us, perhaps because we had
+not so vigorously asserted ourselves.
+
+
+VI
+
+A case in which a personal wrong rather than a personal right was
+offensively asserted, was that of a lady, young and too fair to be so
+unfair, in a crowded train coming from the Doncaster Races to York. She
+had kept a whole first-class compartment to herself, putting her maid
+into the second-class adjoining, and heaping the vacant seats with her
+hand-baggage, which had also overflowed into the corridor. At the time
+the train started she was comforting herself in her luxurious solitude
+with a cup of tea, and she stood up, as if to keep other people out.
+But, after waiting, seven of us, in the corridor, until she should offer
+to admit us, we all swarmed in upon her, and made ourselves indignantly
+at home. When it came to that she offered no protest, but gathered up
+her belongings, and barricaded herself with them. Among the rest there
+was a typewriting-machine, but what manner of young lady she was, or
+whether of the journalistic or the theatrical tribe, has never revealed
+itself to this day. We could not believe that she was very high-born,
+not nearly so high, for instance, as the old lady who helped dispossess
+her, and who, when we ventured the hope that it would not rain on the
+morrow, which was to be St. Leger Day, almost lost the kindness for us
+inspired by some small service, because we had the bad taste to suggest
+such a possibility for so sacred a day.
+
+I never saw people standing in a train, except that once which I have
+already noted, when in a very crowded car in Wales, two women, decent
+elderly persons, got in and were suffered to remain on foot by the young
+men who had comfortable places; no one dreamed, apparently, of offering
+to give up his seat. But, on the other hand, a superior civilization
+is shown in what I may call the manual forbearance of the trolley and
+railway folk, who are so apt to nudge and punch you at home here, when
+they wish your attention. The like happened to me only once in England,
+and that was at Liverpool, where the tram conductor, who laid hands
+on me instead of speaking, had perhaps been corrupted by the unseen
+American influences of a port at which we arrive so abundantly and
+indiscriminately. I did not resent the touch, though it is what every
+one is expected to do, if aggrieved, and every one else does it in
+England. Within his rights, every one is safe; though there may be some
+who have no rights. If there were, I did not see them, and I suppose
+that, as an alien, I might have refused to stand up and uncover when the
+band began playing _God Save the King_, as it did at the end of every
+musical occasion; I might have urged that, being no subject of the King,
+I did not feel bound to join in the general prayer. But that would have
+been churlish, and, where every one had been so civil to me, I did not
+see why I should not be civil to the King, in a small matter. In the
+aggregate indeed, it is not a small matter, and I suppose that the
+stranger always finds the patriotism of a country molestive. Patriotism
+is, at any rate, very disagreeable, with the sole exception of our own,
+which we are constantly wishing to share with other people, especially
+with English people. We spare them none of it, even in their own
+country, and yet many of us object to theirs; I feel that I am myself
+being rather offensive about it, now, at this distance from them. Upon
+the whole, not caring very actively for us, one way or the other, they
+take it amiably; they try to get our point of view, and, as if it were a
+thorn, self-sacrificially press their bosoms against it, in the present
+or recent _entente cordiale_. None of their idiosyncrasies is more
+notable than their patience, their kindness with our divergence from
+them; but I am not sure that, having borne with us when we are by, they
+do not take it out of us when we are away.
+
+We are the poetry of a few, who, we like to think, have studied the
+most deeply into the causes of our being, or its excuses. But you cannot
+always be enjoying poetry, and I could well imagine that our lovers must
+sometimes prefer to shut the page. The common gentleness comes from the
+common indifference, and from something else that I will not directly
+touch upon. What is certain is that, with all manner of strangers,
+the English seem very gentle, when they meet in chance encounter. The
+average level of good manners is high. My experience was not the widest,
+and I am always owning it was not deep; but, such as it was, it brought
+me to the distasteful conviction that in England I did not see the
+mannerless uncouthness which I often see in America, not so often from
+high to low, or from old to young, but the reverse. There may be much
+more than we infer, at the moment, from the modulated voices, which
+sweetens casual intercourse, but there are certain terms of respect,
+almost unknown to us, which more obviously do that effect. It is a pity
+that democracy, being the fine thing it essentially is, should behave
+so rudely. Must we come to family government, in order to be filial or
+fraternal in our bearing with one another? Why should we be so blunt, so
+sharp, so ironical, so brutal in our kindness?
+
+
+VII
+
+The single-mindedness of the English is beautiful. It may not help to
+the instant understanding of our jokes; but then, even we are not always
+joking, and it does help to put us at rest and to make us feel safe. The
+Englishman may not always tell the truth, but he makes us feel that we
+are not so sincere as he; perhaps there are many sorts of sincerity. But
+there is something almost caressing in the kindly pause that precedes
+his perception of your meaning, and this is very pleasing after the
+sense of always having your hearer instantly onto you. When, by a chance
+indefinitely rarer than it is with us at home, one meets an Irishman in
+England, or better still an Irishwoman, there is an instant lift of the
+spirit; and, when one passes the Scotch border, there is so much lift
+that, on returning, one sinks back into the embrace of the English
+temperament, with a sigh for the comfort of its soft unhurried
+expectation that there is really something in what you say which, will
+be clear by-and-by.
+
+Having said so much as this in compliance with the frequent American
+pretence that the English are without humor, I wish to hedge in the
+interest of truth. They certainly are not so constantly joking as we; it
+does not apparently seem to them that fate can be propitiated by a habit
+of pleasantry, or that this is so merry a world that one need go about
+grinning in it. Perhaps the conditions with most of them are harder than
+the conditions with most of us. But, thinking of certain Englishmen
+I have known, I should be ashamed to join in the cry of those
+story-telling Americans whose jokes have sometimes fallen effectless.
+It is true that, wherever the Celt has leavened the doughier Anglo-Saxon
+lump, the expectation of a humorous sympathy is greater; but there are
+subtile spirits of Teutonic origin whose fineness we cannot deny, whose
+delicate gayety is of a sort which may well leave ours impeaching itself
+of a heavier and grosser fibre.
+
+No doubt you must sometimes, and possibly oftenest, go more than
+half-way for the response to your humorous intention. Those subtile
+spirits are shy, and may not offer it an effusive welcome. They are
+also of such an exquisite honesty that, if they do not think your wit
+is funny, they will not smile at it, and this may grieve some of our
+jokers. But, if you have something fine and good in you, you need not be
+afraid they will fail of it, and they will not be so long about finding
+it out as some travellers say. When it comes to the grace of the
+imaginative in your pleasantry, they will be even beforehand with you.
+But in their extreme of impersonality they will leave the initiative to
+you in the matter of humor as in others. They will no more seek out your
+peculiar humor than they will name you in speaking with you.
+
+
+VIII
+
+Nothing in England seeks you out, except the damp. Your impressions, you
+have to fight for them. What you see or hear seems of accident. The sort
+of people you have read of your whole life, and are most intimate with
+in fiction, you must surprise. They no more court observance than the
+birds in whose seasonable slaughter society from the King down delights.
+In fact, it is probable that, if you looked for both, you would find the
+gunner shyer than the gunned. The pheasant and the fox are bred to give
+pleasure by their chase; they are tenderly cared for and watched over
+and kept from harm at the hands of all who do not wish to kill them for
+the joy of killing, and they are not so elusive but they can be seen by
+easy chance. The pheasant especially has at times all but the boldness
+of the barnyard in his fearless port. Once from my passing train, I saw
+him standing in the middle of a ploughed field, erect, distinct, like
+a statue of himself, commemorative of the long ages in which his heroic
+death and martyr sufferance have formed the pride of princes and the
+peril of poachers. But I never once saw him shot, though almost as many
+gunners pursue him as there are pheasants in the land. This alone shows
+how shy the gunners are; and when once I saw the trail of a fox-hunt
+from the same coign of vantage without seeing the fox, I felt that I
+had almost indecently come upon the horse and hounds, and that the pink
+coats and the flowery spread of the dappled dogs over the field were
+mine by a kind of sneak as base as killing a fox to save my hens.
+
+
+IX
+
+Equally with the foxes and the pheasants, the royalties and nobilities
+abound in English novels, which really form the chief means of our
+acquaintance with English life; but the chances that reveal them to the
+average unintroduced, unpresented American are rarer. By these chances,
+I heard, out of the whole peerage, but one lord so addressed in public,
+and that was on a railroad platform where a porter was reassuring him
+about his luggage. Similarly, I once saw a lady of quality, a tall and
+girlish she, who stood beside her husband, absently rubbing with her
+glove the window of her motor, and whom but for the kind interest of our
+cabman we might never have known for a duchess. It is by their personal
+uninsistence largely, no doubt, that the monarchy and the aristocracy
+exist; the figures of the faery dream remain blent with the background,
+and appear from it only when required to lay cornerstones, or preside at
+races, or teas or bazars, or to represent the masses at home and abroad,
+and invisibly hold the viewless reins of government.
+
+Yet it must not be supposed that the commoner sort of dreamers are never
+jealous of these figments of their fancy. They are often so, and rouse
+themselves to self-assertion as frequently as our Better Element flings
+off the yoke of Tammany. At a fair, open to any who would pay, for
+some forgotten good object, such as is always engaging the energies
+of society, I saw moving among the paying guests the tall form of a
+nobleman who had somehow made himself so distasteful to his neighbors
+that they were not his friends, and regularly voted down his men,
+whether they stood for Parliament or County Council, and whether they
+were better than the popular choice or not. As a matter of fact, it was
+said that they were really better, but the people would not have them
+because they were his; and one of the theories of English manliness
+is that the constant pressure from above has toughened the spirit and
+enabled Englishmen to stand up stouter and straighter each in his place,
+just as it is contended elsewhere that the aesthetic qualities of the
+human race have been heightened by its stresses and deprivations in the
+struggle of life.
+
+For my own part, I believe neither the one theory nor the other. People
+are the worse for having people above them, and are the ruder and
+coarser for having to fight their way. If the triumph of social
+inequality is such that there are not four men in London who are not
+snobs, it cannot boast itself greater than the success of economic
+inequality with ourselves, among whom the fight for money has not
+produced of late a first-class poet, painter, or sculptor. The English,
+if they are now the manliest people under the sun, have to thank not
+their masters but themselves, and a nature originally so generous that
+no abuse could lastingly wrong it, no political absurdity spoil it. But
+if this nature had been left free from the beginning, we might see now a
+nation of Englishmen who, instead of being bound so hard and fast in
+the bonds of an imperial patriotism, would be the first in a world-wide
+altruism. Yet their patriotism is so devout that it may well pass itself
+off upon them for a religious emotion, instead of the superstition which
+seems to the stranger the implication of an England in the next world as
+well as in this.
+
+
+X
+
+We fancy that, because we have here an Episcopal Church, with its
+hierarchy, we have something equivalent to the English Church. But that
+is a mistake. The English Church is a part of the whole of English life,
+as the army or navy is; in English crowds, the national priest is not so
+frequent as the national soldier, but he is of as marked a quality, and
+as distinct from the civil world, in uniform, bearing, and aspect; in
+the cathedral towns, he and his like form a sort of spiritual garrison.
+At home here you may be ignorant of the feasts of the Episcopal Church
+without shame or inconvenience; but in England you had better be versed
+in the incidence of all the holy days if you would stand well with
+other men, and would know accurately when the changes in the railroad
+time-tables will take place. It will not do to have ascertained the
+limits of Lent; you must be up in the Michaelmases and Whitmondays,
+and the minor saints’ days. When once you have mastered this
+difficult science, you will realize what a colossal transaction the
+disestablishment of the English Church in England would be, and how it
+would affect the whole social fabric.
+
+But, even when you have learned your lesson, it will not be to you as
+that knowledge which has been lived, and which has no more need ever
+to question itself than the habitual pronunciation of words. If one has
+moved in good English society, one has no need ever to ask how a word is
+pronounced, far less to go to the dictionary; one pronounces it as one
+has always heard it pronounced. The sense of this gives the American a
+sort of despair, like that of a German or French speaking foreigner, who
+perceives that he never will be able to speak English. The American is
+rather worse off, for he has to subdue an inward rebellion, and to form
+even the wish to pronounce some English words as the English do. He
+has, for example, always said “financier,” with the accent on the last
+syllable; and if he has consulted his Webster he has found that there
+was no choice for him. Then, when he hears it pronounced at Oxford by
+the head of a college with the accent on the second syllable, and learns
+on asking that it is never otherwise accented in England, his head
+whirls a little, and he has a sick moment, in which he thinks he had
+better let the verb “to be” govern the accusative as the English do,
+and be done with it, or else telegraph for his passage home at once. Or
+stop! He must not “telegraph,” he must “wire.”
+
+
+XI
+
+As for that breathing in the wrong place which is known as dropping
+one’s aitches, I found that in the long time between the first and last
+of my English sojourns, there had arisen the theory that it was a vice
+purely cockney in origin, and that it had grown upon the nation through
+the National Schools. It is grossly believed, or boldly pretended, that
+till the National School teachers had conformed to the London standard
+in their pronunciation the wrong breathing was almost unknown in
+England, but that now it was heard everywhere south of the Scottish
+border. Worse yet, the teachers in the National Schools had scattered
+far and wide that peculiar intonation, that droll slip or twist of the
+vowel sounds by which the cockney alone formerly proclaimed his low
+breeding, and the infection is now spread as far as popular learning.
+Like the wrong breathing, it is social death “to any he that utters it,”
+ not indeed that swift extinction which follows having your name crossed
+by royalty from the list of guests at a house where royalty is about to
+visit, but a slow, insidious malady, which preys upon its victim, and
+finally destroys him after his life-long struggle to shake it off. It is
+even worse than the wrong breathing, and is destined to sweep the whole
+island, where you can nowhere, even now, be quite safe from hearing
+a woman call herself “a lydy.” It may indeed be the contagion of the
+National School teacher, but I feel quite sure, from long observation of
+the wrong breathing, that the wrong breathing did not spread from London
+through the schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of
+the unbred in England as nasality is with us. Both infirmities are of
+national origin and extent, and both are individual or personal in their
+manifestation. That is, some Americans in every part of the Union talk
+through their noses; some Englishmen in every part of the kingdom drop
+their aitches.
+
+The English-speaking Welsh often drop their aitches, as the
+English-speaking French do, though the Scotch and Irish never drop them,
+any more than the Americans, or the English of the second generation
+among us; but the extremely interesting and great little people of Wales
+are otherwise as unlike the English as their mother-language is. They
+seem capable of doing anything but standing six feet in their stockings,
+which is such a very common achievement with the English, but that is
+the fault of nature which gave them dark complexions and the English
+fair. Where the work of the spirit comes in, it effects such a
+difference between the two peoples as lies between an Eisteddfod and a
+horse-race. While all the singers of Wales met in artistic emulation at
+their national musical festival at Rhyl, all the gamblers of England met
+in the national pastime of playing the horses at Doncaster. More money
+probably changed hands on the events at Doncaster than at Rhyl, and it
+was characteristic of the prevalent influence in the common civilization
+(if there is a civilization common to both races) that the King was at
+Doncaster and not at Rhyl. But I do not say this to his disadvantage,
+for I was myself at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. You cannot, unless
+you have a very practised ear, say which is the finer singer at an
+Eisteddfod, but almost any one can see which horse comes in first at a
+race.
+
+
+XII
+
+What is most striking in the mixture of strains in England is that it
+apparently has not ultimately mixed them; and perhaps after a thousand
+years the racial traits will be found marking Americans as persistently.
+We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be assimilating, the different
+voluntary and involuntary immigrations; but doubtless after two thousand
+years the African, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Gaul,
+the Hun, the Latin, the Slav will be found atavistically asserting his
+origin in certain of their common posterity. The Pennsylvania Germans
+have as stolidly maintained their identity for two centuries as the
+Welsh in Great Britain for twenty, or, so far as history knows, from
+the beginning of time. The prejudices of one British stock concerning
+another are as lively as ever, apparently, however the enmities may
+have worn themselves away. One need not record any of these English
+prejudices concerning the Scotch or Irish; they are too well known; but
+I may set down the opinion of a lively companion in a railroad journey
+that the Welsh are “the prize liars of the universe.” He was an expert
+accountant by profession, and his affairs took him everywhere in the
+three Kingdoms, and this was his settled error; for the Welsh themselves
+know that, if they sometimes seem the prey of a lively imagination, it
+is the philologically noted fault of their language, which refuses to
+lend itself to the accurate expression of fact, but which would probably
+afford them terms for pronouncing the statement of my accountant
+inexact. He was perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions,
+for, though he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests,
+there were things that had never appealed to him. We praised together
+the lovely September landscape through which we were running, and I
+ventured some remark upon the large holdings of the land: a thing that
+always saddened me in the face of nature with the reflection that those
+who tilled the soil owned none of it; though I ought to have remembered
+the times when the soil owned them, and taken heart. My notion seemed to
+strike him for the first time, but he dismissed the fact as a necessary
+part of the English system; it had never occurred to him that there
+could be question of that system. There must be many Englishmen to whom
+it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet them you cannot blame
+the others.
+
+I fancied that one of the Englishmen to whom it might have occurred was
+he whom I met in Wales at Aberystwyth, where we spoke together a moment
+in the shadow of the co-educational University there, and who seemed at
+least of a different mind concerning the Welsh. “These Welsh farmers,”
+ he said, “send their sons and daughters to college as if it were quite
+the natural thing to do. But just imagine a Dorsetshire peasant sending
+his boy to a University!”
+
+We suppose that the large holdings of land are the effect of wrongs and
+abuses now wholly in the past, and that the causes for their increase
+are no longer operative, but are something like those geological laws by
+which the strata under them formed themselves. Once, however, in driving
+through the most beautiful part of England, which I will not specify
+because every part of England is the most beautiful, I came upon an
+illustration of the reverse, as signal as the spectacle of a landslide.
+It was the accumulation, not merely within men’s memories, but within
+the actual generation, of vast bodies of land in the hold of a great
+nobleman who had contrived a title in them by the simple device of
+enclosing the people’s commons. It was a wrong, but there was no one of
+the wronged who was brave enough or rich enough to dispute it through
+the broken law, and no witness public-spirited enough to come to
+their aid. Such things make us think patiently, almost proudly, of
+our national foible of graft, which may really be of feudal origin.
+Doubtless the aggression was attacked in the press, but we all know
+what the attacks of the press amount to against the steadfast will of
+a powerful corporation, and a great nobleman in England is a powerful
+corporation. In this instance he had not apparently taken the people’s
+land without some wish to make them a return for it. He had built a
+handsome road through their property, which he maintained in splendid
+condition, and he allowed them to drive over his road, and to walk
+freely in certain portions of their woods. He had also built a
+magnificent hospital for them, and it seemed rather hard, then, to
+hear that one of the humblest of them had been known to speak of him in
+whispered confidence as a “Upas tree.”
+
+
+XIII
+
+Probably he was not personally a Upas tree, probably the rancor toward
+him left from being bawled after by one of his gatemen at a turning we
+had taken in his enclosure, “That’s a private path!” was unjust. There
+was no sign, such as everywhere in England renders a place secure from
+intrusion. The word “Private” painted up anywhere does the effect of
+bolts and bars and of all obsolete man-traps beyond it, and is not for a
+moment that challenge to the wayfaring foot which it seems so often
+with us; but the warnings to the public which we make so mandatory, the
+English language with unfailing gentleness. You are not told to keep
+your foot or your wheel to a certain pathway; you are “requested,”
+ and sometimes even “kindly requested”; I do not know but once I was
+“respectfully requested.” Perhaps that nobleman’s possession of these
+lands was so new that his retainers had to practise something of
+unwonted rudeness in keeping it wholly his where he chose. At any rate,
+the rule of civility is so universal that the politeness from class to
+class is, for what the stranger sees, all but unfailing. I dare say he
+does not see everything, even the Argus-eyed American, but apparently
+the manners of the lower class, where they have been touched by the
+upper, have been softened and polished to the same consistence
+and complexion. When it comes to the proffers, and refusals, and
+insistences, and acceptances between people of condition, such as I
+witnessed once in a crowded first-class carriage from London on an
+Oxford holiday, nothing could be more gently urgent, more beautifully
+forbearing. If the writers of our romantic novels could get just those
+manners into their fiction, I should not mind their dealing so much with
+the English nobility and gentry; for those who intend being our
+nobility and gentry, by-and-by, could not do better than study such
+high-breeding.
+
+If we approach the morals of either superiors or inferiors, we are in
+a region where it behooves us to tread carefully. To be honest, I know
+nothing about them, and I will not assume to know anything. I heard from
+authority which I could not suspect of posing for omniscience that the
+English rustics were apt to be very depraved, but they may on the
+other hand be saints for all that I can prove against them. They are
+superstitious, it is said, and there are few villages or old houses
+that have not their tutelary spectres. The belief in ghosts is almost
+universal among the people; as I may allow without superiority, for I
+do not know but I believe in them myself, and there are some million of
+American spiritualists who make an open profession of faith in them. It
+is said also that the poor in England are much spoiled by the constant
+aid given them in charity. This is supposed to corrupt them, and to
+make them dependent upon the favors of fortune, rather than the sweat of
+their brows. On the other hand, they often cannot get work, as I infer
+from the armies of the unemployed, and, in these cases, I cannot hold
+them greatly to blame if they bless their givers by their readiness
+to receive. If one may infer from the incessant beneficences, and the
+constant demands for more and more charities, one heaped upon another,
+there are more good objects in England than anywhere else under the sun,
+for one only gives to good objects, of course. The oppression of the
+subscriptions is tempered by the smallness of the sum which may satisfy
+them. “Five shillings is a subscription,” said a friend who was accused
+of really always giving five pounds.
+
+
+XIV
+
+The English rich do not give so spectacularly as our rich do--that
+is, by handfuls of millions, but then the whole community gives more, I
+think, than our community does, and when it does not give, the necessary
+succor is taxed out of its incomes and legacies. I do not mean that
+there is no destitution, but only that the better off seem to have the
+worse off more universally and perpetually in mind than with us. All
+this is believed to be very demoralizing to the poor, and doubtless the
+certainty of soup and flannel is bad for the soul of an old woman whose
+body is doubled up with rheumatism. The Church seems to blame for
+much of the evil that ensues from giving something to people who have
+nothing; but I dare say the Dissenters are also guilty.
+
+Just how much is wanted to stay the stomach of a healthy pauper, it
+would be hard to say; but now and then the wayfarer gets some hint of
+the frequency if not the amount of feeding among the poor who are able
+to feed themselves. One day, in the outskirts--they were very tattered
+and draggled--of Liverpool, we stopped at a pastry-shop, where the kind
+woman “thought she could accommodate” us with a cup of tea, though she
+was terribly pressed with custom from all sorts of minute maids and
+small boys coming in for “penn’orths” of that frightful variety of tart
+and cake which dismays the beholder from innumerable shop windows
+in England. When we were brought our safer refection, we noted her
+activities to the hostess, and she said, “Yes, they all want a bit
+of cake with their tea, even the poorest”; and when we ventured our
+supposition that they made their afternoon tea the last meal of the day,
+she laughed at the notion. “Last meal! They have a good supper before
+they go to bed. Indeed, they all want their four meals a day.”
+
+Another time, thriftily running in a third-class carriage from Crewe to
+Chester, I was joined by a friendly man who addressed me with the frank
+cordiality of the lower classes in recognizing one of their sort. “They
+don’t know how to charge!” he said, with an irony that referred to the
+fourpence he had been obliged to pay for a cup of station tea; and when
+I tried to allege some mitigating facts in behalf of the company, he
+readily became autobiographical. The transition from tea to eating
+generally was easy, and he told me that he was a plumber, going to do a
+job of work at Llandudno, where he had to pay fourteen bob, which I
+knew to be shillings and mentally translated into $3.50, a week for
+his board. His wages were $1.50 a day, which the reader who multiplies
+fourpence by twenty, to make up the difference in money values, will
+find to be the wages of a good mechanic in the first Edward’s time, five
+hundred years ago. On this he professed to live very well. He rose
+every morning at half-past four, and at six he had a breakfast of bread,
+butter, and coffee; at nine he had porridge and coffee; at one, he had
+soup, meat, and eggs, and perhaps beer; at night, after he got home from
+work, he had a stew and a bit of meat, and perhaps beer, with Mother. He
+thought that English people ate too much, generally, and especially
+on Sunday, when they had nothing else to do. Most men never came home
+without asking, “Well, Mother, what have you got for me to eat now?”
+ When I remembered how sparely our farm people and mechanics fared, I
+thought that he was right, or they were wrong; for the puzzling fact
+remained that they looked gaunt and dyspeptic, and he hale and fresh,
+though the difference may have had as much to do with the air as the
+food. I liked him, and I cannot leave him without noting that he was of
+the lean-faced, slightly aquiline British type, with a light mustache;
+he was well dressed and well set up, and he spoke strongly, as North
+Britons do, with nothing of our people’s husky whine. I found him on
+further acquaintance of anti-Chamberlain politics, pro-Boer as to
+the late war, and rather socialistic. He blamed the labor men for
+not choosing labor men to office instead of the gentry who offered
+themselves. He belonged to a plumbers’ union, and he had nothing to
+complain of, but he inferred that the working-man was better off in
+America, from the fact that none of his friends who had gone to the
+States ever came home to stay, though they nearly all came home for
+a holiday, sooner or later. He differed from my other friend, the
+accountant, in being very fond of the Welsh; it must be owned their race
+seemed to have acquired merit with him through the tip of two sovereigns
+which his last employer in Llandudno had given him. On the other hand,
+he had no love for the Italians who were coming in, especially at
+Glasgow. In Glasgow, he said, there were more drunken women than
+anywhere else in the world, though there was no public-house drinking
+with them as in London. This, so far as I got at it, formed his outlook
+on life, but I dare say there was more of it.
+
+
+XV
+
+I was always regretting that I got at the people so little, and that
+only chance hints of what they were thinking and feeling reached me.
+Now and then, a native observer said something about them which
+seemed luminous. “We are frightfully feudal,” such an observer said,
+“especially the poor.” He did not think it a fault, I believe, and only
+used his adverb intensifyingly, for he was of a Tory mind. He meant the
+poor among the country people, who have at last mastered that principle
+of the feudal system which early enabled the great nobles to pay nothing
+for the benefits they enjoyed from it. But my other friend, the plumber,
+was not the least feudal, or not so feudal as many a lowly ward-heeler
+in New York, who helps to make up the muster of some captain of
+politics, under the lead of a common boss. The texture of society, in
+the smarter sense, the narrower sense, is what I could not venture to
+speak of more confidently. Once I asked a friend, a very dear and valued
+friend, whether a man’s origin or occupation would make any difference
+in his social acceptance, if he were otherwise interesting and
+important. He seemed not to know what I would be at, and, when he
+understood, he responded with almost a shout of amazement, “Oh, not the
+least in the world!” But I have my doubts still; and I should say that
+it might be as difficult for a very cultivated and agreeable man servant
+to get on in London society, as for an artist or poet to feel at home
+in the first circles of New York. Possibly, however, London society,
+because of its almost immeasurable vastness, can take in more of more
+sorts of people, without the consciousness of differences which keeps
+our own first circles so elect. I venture, somewhat wildly, somewhat
+unwarrantably, the belief that English society is less sensitive to
+moral differences than ours, and that people with their little _taches_
+would find less anxiety in London than in New York lest they should come
+off on the people they rubbed against. Some Americans, who, even with
+our increasing prevalence of divorces, are not well seen at home, are
+cheerfully welcomed in England.
+
+Perhaps, there, all Americans, good and bad, high and low, coarse and
+fine, are the same to senses not accustomed to our varying textures
+and shades of color; that is a matter I should be glad to remand to the
+psychologist, who will have work enough to do if he comes to inquire
+into such mysteries. One can never be certain just how the English take
+us, or how much, or whether they take us at all. Oftenest I was inclined
+to think that we were imperceptible to them, or that, when we were
+perceptible, they were aware of us as Swedenborg says the most celestial
+angels are aware of evil spirits, merely as something angular. Americans
+were distressful to their consciousness, they did not know why; and
+then they tried to ignore us. But perhaps this is putting it a little
+fantastically. What I know is that one comes increasingly to reserve the
+fact of one’s nationality, when it is not essential to the occasion, and
+to become as much as possible an unknown quality, rather than a quality
+aggressive or positive. Sometimes, when I could feel certain of my
+ground, I ventured my conviction that Englishmen were not so much
+interested in Americans as those Americans who stayed at home were apt
+to think; but when I once expressed this belief to a Unitarian minister,
+whom I met in the West of England, he received it with surprise and
+refusal. He said that in his own immediate circle, at least, his friends
+were interested and increasingly interested in America, what she was
+and what she meant to be, and still looked toward her for the lead
+in certain high things which Englishmen have ceased to expect of
+themselves. My impression is that most of the most forward of the
+English Sociologists regard America as a back number in those political
+economics which imply equality as well as liberty in the future. They do
+not see any difference between our conditions and theirs, as regards
+the man who works for his living with his hands, except that wages are
+higher with us, and that physically there is more elbow-room, though
+mentally and morally there is not. Save a little in my Unitarian
+minister, and this only conjecturally, I did not encounter that fine
+spirit which in Old England used to imagine the New World we have not
+quite turned out to be; but once I met an Englishman who had lived
+in Canada, and who, gentleman-bred as he was, looked back with fond
+homesickness to the woods where he had taken up land, and built himself
+a personable house, chiefly with his own hands. He had lived himself out
+of touch with his old English life in that new country, and had drawn
+breath in an opener and livelier air which filled his lungs as the home
+atmosphere never could again.
+
+
+XVI
+
+Yet he was standing stiffly up for himself, and strewing his
+convictions and opinions broadcast as the English all do when pressed
+by circumstance, while we, with none of their shyness, mostly think our
+thoughts to ourselves. I suppose we do it because we like better than
+they to seem of one effect with the rest of our kind. In England one
+sees a variety of dress in men which one rarely sees at home. They dress
+there not only in keeping with their work and their play, but in the
+indulgence of any freak of personal fancy, so that in the street of a
+provincial town, like Bath, for instance, you will encounter in a short
+walk a greater range of trousers, leggings, caps, hats, coats, jackets,
+collars, scarfs, boots and shoes, of tan and black, than you would meet
+at home in a month of Sundays. The differences do not go to the length
+of fashions, such as reduce our differences to uniformity, and clothe,
+say, our legs in knickerbockers till it is found everybody is wearing
+them, when immediately nobody wears them. Only ladies, of fashions
+beyond men’s, gratify caprices like ours, and even these perhaps not
+voluntarily. In the obedience they show to the rule that they must never
+wear the same dinner or ball gown twice, it was said (but who can ever
+find out the truth of such things?) that they sometimes had sent home
+from the dressmaker’s a number of dresses on liking, and wore them in
+succession, only to return them, all but one at least, as not liked, the
+dressmaker having found her account in her work being shown in society.
+
+[Illustration: AN ENGLISH HOUSEMAID]
+
+I do not know just what is to be inferred from a social fact or
+statement like this, but I may say that the devotion to an ideal of
+social position is far deeper with the English than with us. Whether
+we spend more or not, I believe that the English live much nearer their
+incomes than Americans do. I think that we save more out of our
+earnings than they out of theirs, and that in this we are more like the
+Continental peoples, the French or the Italians. They spend vastly more
+on state than we do, because, for one thing, they have more state to
+spend on. A man may continue to make money in America, and not change
+his manner of living till he chooses, and he may never change it. Such
+a thing could not happen to an Englishwoman as happened to the elderly
+American housewife who walked through the magnificent house which her
+husband had bought to surprise her, and sighed out at last, “Well, now I
+suppose I shall have to keep a girl!” The girl would have been kept
+from the beginning of her husband’s prosperity, and multiplied, till
+the house was full of servants. If you have the means of a gentleman
+in England, you must live like a gentleman, apparently; you cannot live
+plainly, and put by, and largely you must trust to your life-insurance
+as the fortune you will leave your heirs. It cannot be denied that the
+more generous expenditure of the English adds to the grace of life, and
+that they are more hospitable according to their means than we are; or
+than those Continental peoples who are not hospitable at all.
+
+A thing that one feels more and more irritatingly in England is that,
+while with other foreigners we stand on common ground, where we may be
+as unlike them as we choose, with the English we always stand on English
+ground, where we can differ only at our peril, and to our disadvantage.
+A person speaking English and bearing an English name, had better be
+English, for if he cannot it shows, it proves, that there is something
+wrong in him. Our misfortune is that our tradition, and perhaps our
+inclination, obliges us to be un-English, whereas we do not trouble
+ourselves to be un-French, or un-Italian, for we are so by nature. The
+effort involved in distinguishing ourselves breeds a sort of annoyance,
+or call it no more than uneasiness, which is almost as bad as a bad
+conscience; and in our sense of hopeless perdition we turn vindictively
+upon our judge. But that is not fair and it is not wise; he does not
+mean to be our judge, except when he comes to us for the purpose; in his
+own house, he is civilly unaware of putting us to any test whatever. If
+you ask him whether he likes this thing or that of ours, he will tell
+you frankly; he never can see why he should not be frank; he has a kind
+of helplessness in always speaking the truth; and he does not try to
+make it palatable.
+
+
+XVII
+
+An English Radical, who would say of his King no more than that he was
+a good little man, and most useful in promoting friendship with France,
+was inclined to blame us because we did not stay by at the time of our
+Revolution, and help them fight out as Englishmen the fight for English
+freedom. He had none of the loyalty of sentiment which so mystifies the
+American, but plenty of the loyalty of reason, and expected a Utopia
+which should not be of political but of economical cast. But one was
+always coming upon illustrations of the loyalty of sentiment with
+which of course one could have no quarrel, for their patriotism seldom
+concerned us, except rather handsomely to include us. The French have
+ceased to be the hereditary enemy, and the Russians have now taken their
+place in the popular patriotism. I always talked with the lower classes
+when I could, perhaps because I felt myself near them in my unworthy
+way, and one evening in a grassy lane I made the acquaintance of a
+friendly man letting his horse browse the wayside turf. He was in the
+livery-stable line, but he had been a soldier many years. Upon this
+episode he became freely autobiographical, especially concerning his
+service in India. He volunteered the declaration that he had had enough
+of war, but he added, thoughtfully, “I should like to go out for a
+couple of years if there was any trouble with Russia.”
+
+The love of England comes out charmingly in the swarming of English
+tourists in every part of their country. Americans may sometimes
+outnumber them at the Continental shrines, but we are in a pitiful
+minority at the memorable places in England; in fact, we are nowhere
+beside the natives. I liked their fondness for their own so much that
+I never could feel the fine scorn for “trippers” which I believe all
+persons of condition ought to assume. Even when the trippers did
+not seem very intelligently interested in what they saw, they were
+harmlessly employed, for a scene of beauty, or of historic appeal, could
+not be desecrated by the courtships which are constantly going on all
+over England, especially at the holiday seasons.
+
+The English are, indeed, great holiday-makers, even when past the age
+of putting their arms around one another’s waists. The many and many
+seaside resorts form the place of their favorite outings, where they try
+to spend such days and weeks of the late summer as their savings will
+pay for. It is said that families in very humble station save the year
+round for these vacations, and, having put by twelve or fifteen pounds,
+repair to some such waterside as Blackpool, or its analogue in their
+neighborhood, and lavish them upon the brief joy of the time. They
+take the cheaper lodgings, and bring with them the less perishable
+provisions, and lead a life of resolute gayety on the sands and in the
+sea, and at the pier-ends where the negro minstrels and the Pierrots,
+who equally abound, make the afternoons and evenings a delight which no
+one would suspect from their faces to be the wild thing it is. If they
+go home at the end “high sorrowful and cloyed,” there is no forecast of
+it in their demeanor, which is as little troubled as it is animated.
+The young people are even openly gay, and the robustness of their
+flirtations adds sensibly to the interest of the spectator. Our own
+public lovers seem of a humbler sort, and they mostly content themselves
+with the passive embraces of which every seat in our parks affords an
+example; but in England such lovers add playful struggles. A favorite
+pastime seemed to be for one of them to hold something in the hand, and
+for the other to try prying it open. When it was the young man who kept
+his hand shut, the struggle could go on almost indefinitely. I suppose
+it led to many engagements and marriages.
+
+When the young people were not walking up and down, or playfully
+scuffling, they were reading novels; in fact, I do not imagine that
+anywhere else in the world is there a half, or a tenth part, so much
+fiction consumed as in the English summer resorts. It is probably of the
+innutritious lightness of pop-corn; I had never the courage to look at
+the volumes which I could so easily have overlooked; but I am sure it
+was all out of the circulating library. As there were often several
+young women to one man, most of the girls had to content themselves
+with the flirtations in the books, where, I dare say, the heroines
+were always prying the heroes’ hands open. On every seat one found them
+poring upon the glowing page, and met them in every walk with a volume
+under the arm, and another clasped to the heart. At places where the
+hand played, and they were ostensibly listening to the music, they were
+bowed upon their books, and the flutter of the turning leaves almost
+silenced the blare of the horns. By what inspiration they knew when _God
+Save the King_ was coming, and rose with a long sigh heaved in common,
+I should not be able to say. Perhaps they always reached the end of a
+story at the time the band came to that closing number, or perhaps they
+felt its imminence in their nerves. The fiction was not confined to the
+young girls, however. Both sexes and all ages partook of it; I saw as
+many old girls as young girls reading novels, and mothers of families
+were apparently as much addicted to the indulgence. I suppose they put
+by their books when they took tea, which is the other most noticeable
+dissipation in England. But I cannot enter upon that chapter; it is
+too large a theme; I will say, merely, that as the saloons are on Sixth
+Avenue, so the tearooms are in every part of the island.
+
+[Illustration: LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS]
+
+
+XVIII
+
+It had seemed to me in former visits to England that the Christian
+Sabbath was a more depressing day there than here, but from the last
+I have a more cheerful memory of it. I still felt it dispiriting in
+London, where as many fled from it as could, and where the empty streets
+symbolized a world abandoned to destruction; but this was mainly in the
+forenoon. Even then, the markets and fairs in the avenues given up to
+them were the scenes of an activity which was not without gayety, and
+certainly not without noise; and when the afternoon came, the lower
+classes, such as had remained in town, thronged to the public houses,
+and the upper classes to the evening parade in the Park. As to the
+relative amount of church-going, I will not even assume to be sure; but
+I have a fancy that it is a rite much less rigorous than it used to
+be. Still, in provincial places, I found the churches full on a Sunday
+morning, and all who could afford it hallowed the day by putting on
+a frock-coat and a top-hat, which are not worn outside of London on
+week-days. The women, of course, were always in their best on Sunday.
+Perhaps in the very country the upper classes go to church as much as
+formerly, but I have my doubts whether they feel so much obliged to it
+in conformity to usage, or for the sake of example to their inferiors.
+Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there are pretty
+well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive spectacle, and one
+could imagine people resorting to its functions for aesthetic reasons.
+
+But, in these guesses, one must remember that the English who remained
+at home were never Puritanized, never in such measure personally
+conscienced, as those who came to America in the times of the successive
+Protestant fervors; and that is a thing which we are apt to forget. The
+home-keeping English continued, with changes of ritual, much like the
+peoples who still acknowledged as their head “the Bishop of Rome.”
+ Their greater morality, if it was greater, was temperamental rather than
+spiritual, and, leaving the church to look after religion much more than
+our Puritans did, they kept a simplicity of nature impossible to the
+sectaries always taking stock of their souls. In fact, the Calvinists
+of New England were almost essentially different from the Calvinists of
+Holland, of France, even of Scotland. If our ancestors were the children
+of light, as they trusted, they were darkened by the forest, into which
+they plunged, to certain reasons which the children of darkness, as the
+Puritans believed the non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers
+from the world about them. There is no denying that with certain great
+gains, the American Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincialized,
+and that if they lived in the spirit, they lived in it narrowly, while
+the others, who lived in the body, lived in it liberally, or at any rate
+handsomely. From our narrowness we flattered ourselves that we were able
+to imagine a life more broadly based than theirs, or at least a life
+from which theirs must look insufficient and unfinal, so long as man
+feels within himself the prompting to be something better or higher than
+he is. Yet the English life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery
+dream of a king supported in his preeminence by a nobility, a nobility
+supported in turn by a commonalty, a commonalty supported again by a
+proletariat resting upon immeasurable ether; with a system of government
+kept, by assent so general that the dissent does not matter, in the
+hands of a few families reared, if not trained, to power; with a society
+so intimately and thoroughly self-acquainted that one touch of gossip
+makes its whole world kin, and responsive to a single emotion; with a
+charity so wisely studied, and so carefully applied, that restive misery
+never quite grows rebellious; with a patriotism so inborn and ingrained
+that all things English seem righteous because English; with a
+willingness to share the general well-being quite to the verge, but
+never beyond the verge, of public control of the administration--with
+all this, the thing must strike the unbelieving observer as desperately
+perfect. “They have got it down cold,” he must say to himself, and
+confirm himself in his unfaith by reflecting that it is very cold.
+
+
+XIX
+
+The best observer of England that ever was, he whose book about the
+English makes all other comment seem idle and superfluous palaver, that
+Ralph Waldo Emerson whom we always find ahead of us when we look back
+for him, was once, as he relates in a closing chapter of English Traits,
+brought to bay by certain great English friends of his, who challenged
+him to say whether there really were any Americans with an American
+idea, and a theory of our future. “Thus challenged, I bethought myself
+neither of Congress, neither of President nor of Cabinet Ministers, nor
+of such as would make of America another Europe.... I opened the dogma
+of no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and
+the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, It is true that
+I have never yet seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand
+for this truth, and yet ... ‘tis certain, as God liveth, the gun that
+does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect
+a clean revolution.... I insisted ... that the manifest absurdity of
+the view to English feasibility could make no difference to a gentleman;
+that as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and spinach in London
+or in Boston, the soul might quote Talleyrand, ‘_Messieurs, je n’en
+vois pas la nécessité_.’” In other words, Emerson laid before his
+great English friends a programme, as nearly as might then be, of
+philosophical anarchism, and naturally it met with no more acceptance
+than it would if now presented to the most respectable of his American
+readers. Yet it is never to be forgotten that it was the English who,
+with all their weight of feudal tradition, and amidst the nightmares to
+which their faery dream seemed so long subject, invented the only form
+of Democratic Christianity the world has yet known, unless indeed the
+German Mennonites are the same as the earlier English Quakers were in
+creed and life. In the pseudo-republic of the Cromwellian commonwealth
+the English had a state as wholly without liberty, equality, and
+fraternity as in the king-capped oligarchy they had before and have
+had ever since. We may be sure that they will never have such another
+commonwealth, or any resembling ours, which can no longer offer itself
+as an eminent example.
+
+The sort of Englishmen, of whose respect Americans can make surest are
+those English thick-and-thin patriots who admire force and strength, and
+believe that it is the Anglo-Saxon mission to possess the earth, and
+to profit by its weaker peoples, not cruelly, not unkindly, yet
+unquestionably. The Englishmen of whose disrespect we can make surest
+are those who expect to achieve liberty, equality, and fraternity in the
+economic way, the political way having failed; who do not care whether
+the head of the state is born or elected, is called “King” or called
+“President,” since he will presently not be at all; who abhor war, and
+believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and these only if they
+work for a living. They have already had their will with the existing
+English state, until now that state is far more the servant of the
+people in fetching and carrying, in guarding them from hard masters
+and succoring them in their need, than the republic which professes
+to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. When one
+encounters this sort of Englishman, one thinks silently of the child
+labor in the South, of the monopolies in the North, of the companies
+which govern while they serve us, and one hopes that the Englishman is
+not silently thinking of them too. He is probably of the lower classes,
+and one consoles one’s self as one can by holding one’s head higher in
+better company, where, without secret self-contempt, one can be more
+openly proud of our increasing fortunes and our increasing territory,
+and our warlike adequacy to a first position among the nations of
+the world. There is no fear that in such company one’s national
+susceptibilities will be wounded, or that one will not be almost as much
+admired for one’s money as at home. I do not say quite, because there
+are still things in England even more admired than money. Certainly
+a very rich American would be considered in such English society,
+but certainly he would not be so much considered as an equally rich
+Englishman who was also a duke.
+
+I cannot name a nobleman of less rank, because I will not belittle my
+rich countryman, but perhaps the English would think differently, and
+would look upon him as lower than the latest peer or the newest knight
+of the King’s creation. The King, who has no power, can do almost
+anything in England; and his touch, which is no longer sovereign for
+scrofula, can add dignity and give absolute standing to a man whose
+achievements merit it, but who with us would fail of anything like it.
+The English system is more logical than ours, but not so reasonable. The
+English have seen from the beginning inequality and the rule of the few.
+We can hardly prove that we see, in the future, equality and the rule
+of the many. Yet our vision is doubtless prophetic, whatever obliquities
+our frequent astigmatism may impart to it. Meantime, in its ampler range
+there is room for the play of any misgiving short of denial; but the
+English cannot doubt the justice of what they have seen without forming
+an eccentric relation to the actual fact. The Englishman who refuses the
+formal recognition of his distinction by his prince is the anomaly,
+not the Englishman who accepts it. Gladstone who declines a peerage is
+anomalous, not Tennyson who takes it. As part of the English system, as
+a true believer in the oligarchically administered monarchy, Gladstone
+was illogical, and Tennyson was logical.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg’s Seven English Cities, by William Dean Howells
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Seven English Cities, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Seven English Cities
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7187]
+This file was first posted on March 24, 2003
+Last Updated: April 6, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tricia Gilbert, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES
+
+By W. D. Howells
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+[Illustration: A VIEW OF MONK BAR]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+   BOOKS OF TRAVEL AND COMMENT BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+
+
+   ROMAN HOLIDAYS............................... net $3.00
+       Traveller's Edition...................... net  3.00
+
+   CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS, Ill'd...... net  3.00
+       Traveller's Edition...................... net  3.00
+
+   LONDON FILMS. Illustrated.................... net  2.25
+       Traveller's Edition...................... net  2.25
+
+   A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN.......................       .50
+
+   MY YEAR IN A LOG CABIN. Illustrated..........       .50
+
+   CRITICISM AND FICTION........................      1.00
+
+   HEROINES OF FICTION. Illustrated............. net  3.75
+
+   IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES..................      1.50
+
+   LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. Ill'd.....      2.50
+
+   LITERATURE AND LIFE.......................... net  2.25
+
+   MODERN ITALIAN POETS. Illustrated............      2.00
+
+   MY LITERARY PASSIONS.........................      1.75
+
+   STOPS OF VARIOUS QUILLS......................      2.50
+        Limited Edition.........................     15.00
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL
+   SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER
+   IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD
+   NINE DAYS' WONDER IN YORK
+   TWO YORKISH EPISODES
+   A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
+   THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS
+   ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+   LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+   GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS (not available)
+
+
+   A VIEW OF MONK BAR
+   ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LIVERPOOL
+   THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL
+   THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS
+   MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL
+   TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER
+   THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL
+   TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD
+   YORK MINSTER--THE GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND
+   BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER
+   WALMGATE BAR HAS A BARBICAN
+   ST. MARY'S ABBEY
+   CLIFFORD'S TOWER
+   YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER
+   DURHAM CATHEDRAL--NORTHWEST VIEW
+   FINCHALE PRIORY
+   DURHAM CATHEDRAL--ITS MATCHLESS SEAT ON THE BLUFFS OF THE RIVER
+   THE "STUMP" OF ST. BOTOLPH'S CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY
+   THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND QUINCY MARKET-PLACES
+   THE RIVER AT EVENING
+   LIFTING ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM
+   FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY
+   THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH
+   ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS
+   LLANDUDNO--THE CITY AND HARBOR
+   LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME'S NECK
+   THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO
+   CONWAY CASTLE
+   PLAS MAWR
+   A PRESENTATION AT COURT
+   THE ENGLISH HOUSEMAID
+   LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL
+
+
+Why should the proud stomach of American travel, much tossed in the
+transatlantic voyage, so instantly have itself carried from Liverpool
+to any point where trains will convey it? Liverpool is most worthy to be
+seen and known, and no one who looks up from the bacon and eggs of his
+first hotel breakfast after landing, and finds himself confronted by the
+coal-smoked Greek architecture of St. George's Hall, can deny that it is
+of a singularly noble presence. The city has moments of failing in the
+promise of this classic edifice, but every now and then it reverts to
+it, and reminds the traveller that he is in a great modern metropolis of
+commerce by many other noble edifices.
+
+
+I
+
+Liverpool does not remind him of this so much as the good and true
+Baedeker professes, in the dockside run on the overhead railway (as the
+place unambitiously calls its elevated road); but then, as I noted in my
+account of Southampton, docks have a fancy of taking themselves in,
+and eluding the tourist eye, and even when they "flank the Mersey for a
+distance of 6-7 M." they do not respond to American curiosity so frankly
+as could be wished. They are like other English things in that, however,
+and it must be said for them that when apparent they are sometimes
+unimpressive. From my own note-book, indeed, I find that I pretended to
+think them "wonderful and almost endless," and so I dare say they
+are. But they formed only a very perfunctory interest of our day at
+Liverpool, where we had come to meet, not to take, a steamer.
+
+Our run from London, in the heart of June, was very quick and pleasant,
+through a neat country and many tidy towns. In the meadows the elms
+seemed to droop like our own rather than to hold themselves oakenly
+upright like the English; the cattle stood about in the yellow
+buttercups, knee-deep, white American daisies, and red clover, and among
+the sheep we had our choice of shorn and unshorn; they were equally
+abundant. Some of the blossomy May was left yet on the hawthorns, and
+over all the sky hovered, with pale-white clouds in pale-blue spaces
+of air like an inverted lake of bonnyclabber. We stopped the night at
+Chester, and the next evening, in the full daylight of 7.40, we pushed
+on to Liverpool, over lovely levels, with a ground swell like that of
+Kansas plains, under a sunset drying its tears and at last radiantly
+smiling.
+
+
+II
+
+The hotel in Liverpool swarmed and buzzed with busy and murmurous
+American arrivals. One could hardly get at the office window, on account
+of them, to plead for a room. A dense group of our countrywomen were
+buying picture-postals of the rather suave office-ladies, and helplessly
+fawning on them in the inept confidences of American women with all
+persons in official or servile attendance. "Let me stay here," one of
+them entreated, "because there's such a draught at the other window.
+May I?" She was a gentle child of forty-five or fifty; and I do not know
+whether she was allowed to stay in the sheltered nook or not, tender
+creature. As she was in every one else's way there, possibly she was
+harshly driven into the flaw at the other window.
+
+[Illustration: ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LIVERPOOL]
+
+The place was a little America which swelled into a larger with the
+arrivals of the successive steamers, though the soft swift English
+trains bore our co-nationals away as rapidly as they could. Many
+familiar accents remained till the morning, and the breakfast-room was
+full of a nasal resonance which would have made one at home anywhere in
+our East or West. I, who was then vainly trying to be English, escaped
+to the congenial top of the farthest bound tram, and flew, at the rate
+of four miles an hour, to the uttermost suburbs of Liverpool, whither
+no rumor of my native speech could penetrate. It was some balm to my
+wounded pride of country to note how pale and small the average type of
+the local people was. The poorer classes swarmed along a great part
+of the tram-line in side streets of a hard, stony look, and what
+characterized itself to me as a sort of iron squalor seemed to prevail.
+You cannot anywhere have great prosperity without great adversity, just
+as you cannot have day without night, and the more Liverpool evidently
+flourished the more it plainly languished. I found no pleasure in the
+paradox, and I was not overjoyed by the inevitable ugliness of the brick
+villas of the suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed. But
+then, after divers tram changes, came the consolation of beautiful
+riverside beaches, thronged with people who looked gay at that distance,
+and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills, blue, blue.
+
+
+III
+
+At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we
+rejected a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought it too
+thatched and too cottage to be quite true (though I do not now say that
+there were vermin in the straw roof), and accepted the hospitality of
+a pastry-cook's shop. We felt the more at home with the kind woman
+who kept it because she had a brother at Chicago in the employ of the
+Pinkerton Detective Agency, and had once been in Stratford-on-Avon; this
+doubly satisfied us as cultivated Americans. She had a Welsh name, and
+she testified to a great prevalence of Welsh and Irish in the population
+of Liverpool; besides, she sent us to a church of the Crusaders at
+Little Crosby, and it was no fault of hers that we did not find it. We
+found one of the many old crosses for which Little Crosby is named, and
+this was quite as much as we merited. It stood at the intersection of
+the streets in what seemed the fragment of a village, not yet lost in
+the vast maw of the city, and it calmed all the simple neighborhood,
+so that we sat down at its foot and rested a long, long minute till the
+tram came by and took us back into the loud, hard heart of Liverpool.
+
+I do not mean to blame it, for it was no louder or harder than the
+hearts of other big towns, and it had some alleviation from the many
+young couples who were out together half-holidaying in the unusually
+pleasant Saturday weather. I wish their complexions had been better,
+but you cannot have South-of-England color if you live as far north as
+Liverpool, and all the world knows what the American color is. The young
+couples abounded in the Gallery of Fine Arts, where they frankly looked
+at one another instead of the pictures. The pictures might have been
+better, but then they might have been worse (there being examples of
+Filippo Lippi, Memmi, Holbein, and, above all, the _Dante's Dream_ of
+Rossetti); and in any case those couples could come and see them when
+they were old men and women; but now they had one another in a moment of
+half-holiday which could not last forever.
+
+In the evening there were not so many lovers at the religious meetings
+before the classic edifice opposite the hotel, where the devotions were
+transacted with the help of a brass-band; but there were many youths
+smoking short pipes, and flitting from one preacher to another, in the
+half-dozen groups. Some preachers were nonconformist, but there was one
+perspiring Anglican priest who labored earnestly with his hearers, and
+who had more of his aspirates in the right place. Many of his hearers
+were in the rags which seem a favorite wear in Liverpool, and I hope his
+words did their poor hearts good.
+
+Slightly apart from the several congregations, I found myself with a
+fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me in an accent
+so unlike my own American that I ventured to answer him in Italian. He
+was indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos Ayres and was
+presently thinking of New York; and we had some friendly discourse
+together concerning the English. His ideas of them were often so
+parallel with my own that I hardly know how to say he thought them
+an improvident people. I owned that they spent much more on state, or
+station, than the Americans; but we neither had any censure for them
+otherwise. He was of that philosophic mind which one is rather apt to
+encounter in the Latin races, and I could well wish for his further
+acquaintance. His talk rapt me to far other and earlier scenes, and I
+seemed to be conversing with him under a Venetian heaven, among objects
+of art more convincing than the equestrian statue of the late Queen, who
+had no special motive I could think of for being shown to her rightly
+loving subjects on horseback. We parted with the expressed hope of
+seeing each other again, and if this should meet his eye and he can
+recall the pale young man, with the dark full beard, who chatted with
+him between the pillars of the Piazzetta, forty years before our actual
+encounter I would be glad of his address.
+
+
+IV
+
+How strange are the uses of travel! There was a time when the mention
+of Liverpool would have conjured up for me nothing but the thought of
+Hawthorne, who spent divers dull consular years there, and has left a
+record of them which I had read, with the wish that it were cheerfuler.
+Yet, now, here on the ground his feet might have trod, and in the very
+smoke he breathed, I did not once think of him. I thought as little of
+that poor Felicia Hemans, whose poetry filled my school-reading years
+with the roar of the wintry sea breaking from the waveless Plymouth Bay
+on the stern and rock-bound coast where the Pilgrim Fathers landed on a
+bowlder measuring eight by ten feet, now fenced in against the predatory
+hammers and chisels of reverent visitors. I knew that Gladstone was born
+at Liverpool, but not Mrs. Oliphant, and the only literary shade I could
+summon from a past vague enough to my ignorance was William Roscoe,
+whose _Life of Leo X._, in the Bohn Library, had been too much for my
+young zeal when my zeal was still young. My other memories of Liverpool
+have been acquired since my visit, and I now recur fondly to the
+picturesque times when King John founded a castle there, to the prouder
+times when Sir Francis Bacon represented it in Parliament; or again to
+the brave days when it resisted Prince Rupert for three weeks, and the
+inglorious epoch when the new city (it was then only some four or five
+hundred years old) began to flourish on the trade in slaves with the
+colonies of the Spanish Main, and on the conjoint and congenial traffic
+in rum, sugar, and tobacco.
+
+[Illustration: THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL]
+
+It will be suspected from these reminiscences that I have been studying
+a page of fine print in Baedeker, and I will not deceive the reader. It
+is true; but it is also true that I had some wonder, altogether my own,
+that so great a city should make so small an appeal to the imagination.
+In this it outdoes almost any metropolis of our own. Even in journalism,
+an intensely modern product, it does not excel; Manchester has its able
+and well-written _Guardian_, but what has Liverpool? Glasgow has its
+Glasgow School of Painting, but again what has Liverpool? It is said
+that not above a million of its people live in it; all the rest, who
+can, escape to Chester, where they perhaps vainly hope to escape the
+Americans. There, intrenched in charming villas behind myrtle hedges,
+they measurably do so; but Americans are very penetrating, and I would
+not be sure that the thickest and highest hedge was invulnerable to
+them. As it is, they probably constitute the best society of Liverpool,
+which the natives have abandoned to them, though they do not constitute
+it permanently, but consecutively. Every Cunarder, every White Star,
+pours out upon a city abandoned by its own good society a flood of
+cultivated Americans, who eddy into its hotels, and then rush out
+of them by every train within twenty-four hours, and often within
+twenty-five minutes. They understand that there are no objects of
+interest in Liverpool; and they are not met at the Customs with
+invitations to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner from the people of rank
+and fashion with whom they have come to associate. These have their
+stately seats in the lovely neighboring country, but they are not at the
+landing-stage, and even the uncultivated American cannot stay for the
+vast bourgeoisie of which Liverpool, like the cities of his own land,
+is composed. Our own cities have a social consciousness, and are each
+sensible of being a centre, with a metropolitan destiny; but the strange
+thing about Liverpool and the like English towns is that they are
+without any social consciousness. Their meek millions are socially
+unborn; they can come into the world only in London, and in their
+prenatal obscurity they remain folded in a dreamless silence, while all
+the commercial and industrial energies rage round them in a gigantic
+maturity.
+
+
+V
+
+The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of entry
+for our human cargoes, indentured apprentices of the beautiful, the
+historical. With the almost immediate transference of the original
+transatlantic steamship interests from Bristol, Liverpool became the
+only place where you could arrive. American lines, long erased from the
+seas, and the Inman line, the Cunard line, the White Star line, and the
+rest, would land you nowhere else. Then heretical steamers began to land
+you at Glasgow; worse schismatics carried you to Southampton; there
+were heterodox craft that touched at Plymouth, and now great swelling
+agnostics bring you to London itself. Still, Liverpool remains the
+greatest port of entry for our probationers, who are bound out to the
+hotels and railroad companies of all Europe till they have morally paid
+back their fare. The superstition that if you go in a Cunarder you can
+sleep on both ears is no longer so exclusive as it once was; yet the
+Cunarder continues an ark of safety for the timid and despairing,
+and the cooking is so much better than it used to be that if in
+contravention of the old Cunard rule against a passenger's being carried
+overboard you do go down, you may be reasonably sure of having eaten
+something that the wallowing sea-monsters will like in you.
+
+[Illustration: THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS]
+
+I have tried to give some notion of the fond behavior of the arriving
+Americans in the hotels; no art can give the impression of their
+exceeding multitude. Expresses, panting with as much impatience as the
+disciplined English expresses ever suffer themselves to show, await them
+in the stations, which are effectively parts of the great hotels, and
+whir away to London with them as soon as they can drive up from the
+steamer; but many remain to rest, to get the sea out of their heads
+and legs, and to prepare their spirits for adjustment to the novel
+conditions. These the successive trains carry into the heart of the land
+everywhere, these and their baggage, to which they continue attached by
+their very heart-strings, invisibly stretching from their first-class
+corridor compartments to the different luggage-vans. I must say they
+have very tenderly, very perfectly imagined us, all those hotel people
+and railroad folk, and fold us, anxious and bewildered exiles, in a
+reassuring and consoling embrace which leaves all their hands--they are
+Briarean--free for the acceptance of our wide, wild tips. You may trust
+yourself implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not
+trust the head porter who tells you to take the London and Northwestern,
+for then you will have to change four times on the way and at every
+junction personally see that your baggage is unladen and started anew to
+its destination.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER
+
+
+I will suppose the reader not to be going to Oxford, but, in compliance
+with the scheme of this paper, to Manchester, where there is perhaps
+no other reason for his going. He will there, for one thing, find the
+supreme type of the railroad hotel which in England so promptly shelters
+and so kindly soothes the fluttered exile. At Manchester, even more than
+at Liverpool, we are imagined in the immense railroad station hotel,
+which is indeed perhaps superorganized and over-convenienced after an
+American ideal: one does not, for instance, desire a striking, or even
+a ticking, clock in the transom above one's bedroom door; but the like
+type of hotel is to be found at every great railroad centre or terminal
+in England, and it is never to be found quite bad, though of course it
+is sometimes better and sometimes worse. It is hard to know if it is
+more hotel or more station; perhaps it is a mixture of each which defies
+analysis; but in its well-studied composition you pass, as it were, from
+your car to your room, as from one chamber to another. This is putting
+the fact poetically; but, prosaically, the intervening steps are few at
+the most; and when you have entered your room your train has ceased to
+be. The simple miracle would be impossible in America, where our trains,
+when not shrieking at the tops of their whistles, are backing and
+filling with a wild clangor of their bells, and making a bedlam of their
+stations; but in England they
+
+     "Come like shadows, so depart,"
+
+and make no sound within the vast caravansary where the enchanted
+traveller has changed from them into a world of dreams.
+
+
+I
+
+These hotels are, next to the cathedrals, perhaps the greatest wonder
+of England, and in Manchester the railway hotel is in some ways more
+wonderful than the cathedral, which is not so much planned on our native
+methods. Yet this has the merit, if it is a merit, of antedating our
+Discovery by nearly a century, and pre-historically it is indefinitely
+older. My sole recorded impression of it is that I found it smelling
+strongly of coal-gas, such as comes up the register when your furnace is
+mismanaged; but that is not strange in such a manufacturing centre; and
+it would be paltering with the truth not to own a general sense of the
+beauty and grandeur in it which no English cathedral is without. The
+morning was fitly dim and chill, and one could move about in the vague
+all the more comfortably for the absence of that appeal of thronging
+monuments which harasses and bewilders the visitor in other cathedrals;
+one could really give one's self up to serious emotion, and not be
+sordidly and rapaciously concerned with objects of interest. Manchester
+has been an episcopal see only some fifty years; before that the
+cathedral was simply T' Owd Church, and in this character it is still
+venerable, and is none the less so because of the statue of Oliver
+Cromwell which holds the chief place in the open square before it. Call
+it an incongruity, if you will, but that enemy of episcopacy is at least
+not accused of stabling his horses in The Old Church at Manchester, or
+despoiling it of its sacred images and stained glass, and he merits a
+monument there if anywhere.
+
+[Illustration: MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL]
+
+With the constantly passing trams which traverse the square, he is
+undoubtedly more significant of modern Manchester than the episcopacy
+is, and perhaps of that older Manchester which held for him against the
+king, and that yet older Manchester of John Bradford, the first martyr
+of the Reformation to suffer death at the stake in Smithfield. Of the
+still yet older, far older Manchester, which trafficked with the Greeks
+of Marseilles, and later passed under the yoke of Agricola and was
+a Roman military station, and got the name of Maen-ceaster from the
+Saxons, and was duly bedevilled by the Danes and mishandled by the
+Normans, there may be traces in the temperament of the modern town
+which would escape even the scrutiny of the hurried American. Such
+a compatriot was indeed much more bent upon getting a pair of cotton
+socks, like those his own continent wears almost universally in summer,
+but a series of exhaustive visits to all the leading haberdashers in
+Manchester developed the strange fact that there, in the world-heart of
+the cotton-spinning industry, there was no such thing to be found.
+In Manchester there are only woollen socks, heavier or lighter, to be
+bought, and the shopmen smile pityingly if you say, in your strange
+madness, that woollen socks are not for summer wear. Possibly, however,
+it was not summer in Manchester, and we were misled by the almanac.
+Possibly we had been spoiled by three weeks of warm, sunny rain on the
+Welsh coast, and imagined a vain thing in supposing that the end of
+August was not the beginning of November.
+
+
+II
+
+I thought Manchester, however, as it shows itself in its public
+edifices, a most dignified town, with as great beauty as could be
+expected of a place which has always had so much to do besides looking
+after its figure and complexion. The very charming series or system
+of parks, public gardens, and playgrounds, unusual in their number and
+variety, had a sympathetic allure in the gray, cool light, even to the
+spectator passing in a hurried hansom. They have not the unity of
+the Boston or Chicago parkways, and I will own that I had not come to
+Manchester for them. What interested me more were the miles and miles
+of comfortable-looking little brick houses in which, for all I knew, the
+mill-labor dwelt. Very possibly it did not; the mills themselves are
+now nearly all, or mostly, outside of Manchester, and perhaps for this
+reason I did not find the slums, when shown them, very slummy, and I
+saw no such dreadful shapes of rags and dirt as in Liverpool. We passed
+through a quarter of large, old-fashioned mansions, as charming as
+they were unimagined of Manchester; but these could not have been the
+dwellings of the mill-hands, any more than of the mill-owners. The
+mill-owners, at least, live in suburban palaces and villas, which I
+fancy by this time are not
+
+     --"pricking a cockney ear,"
+
+as in the time of Tennyson's "Maud."
+
+What wild and whirling insolences, however, the people who have greatly
+made the greatness of England have in all times suffered from their
+poets and novelists, with few exceptions! One need not be a very blind
+devotee of commercialism or industrialism to resent the affronts put
+upon them, when one comes to the scenes of such mighty achievement as
+Liverpool, and Manchester, and Sheffield; but how mildly they seem to
+have taken it all--with what a meek subordination and sufferance! One
+asks one's self whether the society of such places can be much inferior
+to that of Pittsburg, or Chicago, or St. Louis, which, even from the
+literary attics of New York, we should not exactly allow ourselves to
+spit upon. Practically, I know nothing about society in Manchester, or
+rather, out of it; and I can only say of the general type, of richer or
+poorer, as I saw it in the streets, that it was uncommonly good. Not so
+many women as men were abroad in such weather as we had, and I cannot be
+sure that the sex shows there that superiority physically which it has
+long held morally with us. One learns in the north not to look for the
+beautiful color of the south and west; but in Manchester the average
+faces were intelligent and the figures good.
+
+
+III
+
+With such a journal as the Manchester _Guardian_ still keeping its
+high rank among English newspapers, there cannot be question of the
+journalistic sort of thinking in the place. Of the sort that comes to
+its effect in literature, such as, say, Mrs. Gaskell's novels, there may
+also still be as much as ever; and I will not hazard my safe ignorance
+in a perilous conjecture. I can only say that of the Unitarianism
+which eventuated in that literature, I heard it had largely turned to
+episcopacy, as Unitarianism has in our own Boston. I must not forget
+that one of our religions, now a dying faith, was invented in Manchester
+by Ann Lee, who brought, through the usual persecutions, Shakerism to
+such spiritual importance as it has now lost in these States. Only those
+who have known the Shakers, with their good lives and gentle ways,
+can regret with me the decline of the celibate communism which their
+foundress imagined in her marital relations with the Lancashire
+blacksmith she left behind her.
+
+I am reminded (or perhaps instructed) by Mr. Hope Moncrieff in Black's
+excellent _Guide to Manchester_ that before Mrs. Gaskell's celebrity the
+fitful fame of De Quincey shed a backward gleam upon his native place,
+which can still show the house where he was probably born and the
+grammar-school he certainly ran away from. In my forgetfulness, or my
+ignorance, that Manchester was the mother of this tricksy master-spirit
+of English prose, who was an idol of my youth, I failed to visit either
+house. The renown of Cobden and of Bright is precious to a larger world
+than mine; and the name of the stalwart Quaker friend of man is dear
+to every American who remembers the heroic part he played in our behalf
+during our war for the Union. It is one of the amusing anomalies of
+the British constitution, that the great city from whose political
+fame these names are inseparable should have had no representation in
+Parliament from Cromwell's time to Victoria's. Fancy Akron, Ohio, or
+Grand Rapids, Michigan, without a member of Congress!
+
+[Illustration: TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER]
+
+The "Manchester school" of political economy has long since passed
+into reproach if not obloquy with people for whom a byword is a potent
+weapon, and perhaps the easiest they can handle, and I am not myself
+so extreme a _laissez-faireist_ as to have thought of that school with
+pathos in the city of its origin; but I dare say it was a good thing
+in its time. We are only now slowly learning how to apply the opposite
+social principles in behalf of the Man rather than the Master, and
+we have not yet surmounted all the difficulties or dangers of the
+experiment. It is droll how, in a tolerably well-meaning world like
+this, any sort of contempt becomes inclusive, and a whole population
+suffers for the vice, or it may be the virtue, of a very small majority,
+or a very powerful minority. Probably the most liberal and intelligent
+populations of Great Britain are those of Manchester and Birmingham,
+names which have stood for a hard and sordid industrialism, unrelieved
+by noble sympathies and impulses. It is quite possible that a less
+generous spirit than mine would have censured the "Manchester school"
+for the weather of the place, and found in its cold gray light the
+effect of the Gradgrind philosophy which once wrapt a world of fiction
+in gloom.
+
+
+IV
+
+I can only be sure that the light, what little there was of it, was very
+cold and gray, but it quite sufficed to show the huge lowries, as the
+wagons are called, passing through the streets with the cotton fabrics
+of the place in certain stages of manufacture: perhaps the raw, perhaps
+the finished material. In Manchester itself one sees not much else of
+"the cotton-spinning chorus" which has sent its name so far. The cotton
+is now spun in ten or twenty towns in the nearer or farther neighborhood
+of the great city, as every one but myself and some ninety millions of
+other Americans well know. I had seen something of cotton-mills in our
+Lowell, and I was eager, if not willing, to contrast them with the mills
+of Manchester; but such of these as still remained there were, for my
+luckless moment, inoperative. Personal influences brought me within one
+or two days of their starting up; one almost started up during my brief
+stay; but a great mill, employing perhaps a thousand hands, cannot start
+up for the sake of the impression desired by the aesthetic visitor, and
+I had to come away without mine.
+
+I had to come away without that personal acquaintance with the great
+Manchester ship-canal which I almost equally desired. Coming or going, I
+asked about it, and was told, looking for it from the car window, there,
+_there_ it was! but beyond a glimpse of something very long and very
+straight marking the landscape with lines no more convincing than those
+which science was once decided, and then undecided, to call canals on
+the planet Mars, I had no sight of it. I do not say this was not
+my fault; and I will not pretend that the canal, like the mills of
+Manchester, was not running. I dare say I was not in the right hands,
+but this was not for want of trying to get into them. In the local
+delusion that it was then summer, those whose kindness might have
+befriended the ignorance of the stranger were "away on their holidays":
+that was exactly the phrase.
+
+When, by a smiling chance, I fell into the right hands and was borne
+to the Cotton Exchange I did not fail of a due sense of the important
+scene, I hope. The building itself, like the other public buildings of
+Manchester, is most dignified, and the great hall of the exchange is
+very noble. I would not, if I could, have repressed a thrill of pride
+in seeing our national colors and emblems equalled with those of Great
+Britain at one end of the room, but these were the only things American
+in the impression left. We made our way through the momently thickening
+groups on the floor, and in the guidance of a member of the exchange
+found a favorable point of observation in the gallery. From this the
+vast space below showed first a moving surface of hats, with few silk
+toppers among them, but a multitude of panamas and other straws. The
+marketing was not carried on with anything like the wild, rangy movement
+of our Stock Exchange, and the floor sent up no such hell-roaring (there
+is no other phrase for it) tumult as rises from the mad but not malign
+demons of that most dramatic representation of perdition. The merchants,
+alike staid, whether old or young, congregated in groups which, dealing
+in a common type of goods, kept the same places till, toward three
+o'clock, they were lost in the mass which covered the floor. Even
+then there was no uproar, no rush or push, no sharp cries or frenzied
+shouting; but from the crowd, which was largely made up of elderly men,
+there rose a sort of surd, rich hum, deepening ever, and never breaking
+into a shriek of torment or derision. It was not histrionic, and yet for
+its commercial importance it was one of the most moving spectacles which
+could offer itself to the eye in the whole world.
+
+[Illustration: THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL]
+
+I cannot pretend to have profited by my visit to that immensely valuable
+deposit of books, bought from the Spencer family at Althorp, and
+dedicated as the Rylands library to the memory of a citizen of
+Manchester. Books in a library, except you have time and free access to
+them, are as baffling as so many bottles in a wine-cellar, which are
+not opened for you, and which if they were would equally go to your head
+without final advantage. I find, therefore, that my sole note upon
+the Rylands Library is the very honest one that it smelt, like the
+cathedral, of coal-gas. The absence of this gas was the least merit
+of the beautiful old Chetham College, with its library dating from the
+seventeenth century, and claiming to have been the first free library in
+England, and doubtless the world. In the cloistered picturesqueness
+of the place, its mediaeval memorials, and its ancient peace, I found
+myself again in those dear Middle Ages which are nowhere quite wanting
+in England, and against which I rubbed off all smirch of the modernity I
+had come to Manchester for.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD
+
+
+If I had waited a little till I had got into the beautiful Derbyshire
+country which lies, or rather rolls, between Manchester and Sheffield,
+I could as easily have got rid of my epoch in the smiling agricultural
+landscape. I do not know just the measure of the Black Country in
+England, or where Sheffield begins to be perhaps the blackest spot in
+it; but I am sure that nothing not surgically clean could be whiter than
+the roads that, almost as soon as we were free of Manchester, began to
+climb the green, thickly wooded hills, and dip into the grassy and leafy
+valleys. In the very heart of the loveliness we found Sheffield most
+nobly posed against a lurid sunset, and clouding the sky, which can
+never be certain of being blue, with the smoke of a thousand towering
+chimneys. From whatever point you have it, the sight is most prodigious,
+but no doubt the subjective sense of the great ducal mansions and
+estates which neighbor the mirky metropolis of steel and iron has its
+part in heightening the dramatic effect.
+
+
+I
+
+The English, with their love of brevity and simplicity, call these proud
+seats the Dukeries, but our affair was not with them, and I shall not
+be able to follow the footmen or butlers or housekeepers who would
+so obligingly show them to the reader in my company. I had a fine
+consciousness of passing some of them on my way into the town, and when
+there of being, however, incongruously, in the midst of them.
+Worksop, more properly than Sheffield, is the plebeian heart of these
+aristocratic homes, or sojourns, which no better advised traveller,
+or less hurried, will fail to see. But I was in Sheffield to see the
+capital of the Black Country in its most characteristic aspects, and I
+thought it felicitously in keeping, after I had dined (less well than I
+could have wished, at the railway hotel which scarcely kept the promise
+made for it by other like hotels) that I should be tempted beyond my
+strength to go and see that colored opera which we had lately sent,
+after its signal success with us, to an even greater prosperity in
+England. _In Dahomey_ is a musical drama not pitched in the highest key,
+but it is a genuine product of our national life, and to witness its
+performance by the colored brethren who invented it, and were giving
+it with great applause in an atmosphere quite undarkened by our racial
+prejudices, was an experience which I would not have missed for many
+Dukeries. The kindly house was not so suffocatingly full that it could
+not find breath for cheers and laughter; but I proudly felt that no
+one there could delight so intelligently as the sole American, in the
+familiar Bowery figures, the blue policemen, the varying darky types,
+which peopled a scene largely laid in Africa. The local New York
+suggestions were often from Mr. Edward Harrigan, and all the more
+genuine for that, but there was a final cake-walk which owed its
+inspiration wholly to the genius of a race destined to greater triumphs
+in music and art, and perhaps to a kindlier civilization than our ideals
+have evolved in yet. It was pleasant to look upon those different shades
+of color, from dead black to creamy blond, in their novel relief against
+an air of ungrudging, of even respectful, appreciation, and I dare say
+the poor things liked it for themselves as much as I liked it for them.
+At a fine moment of the affair I was aware of a figure in evening dress,
+standing near me, and regarding the stage with critical severity:
+a young man, but shrewd and well in hand, who, as the unmistakable
+manager, was, I hope, finally as well satisfied as the other spectators.
+
+
+II
+
+I myself came away entirely satisfied, indeed, but for the lasting pang
+I inflicted upon myself by denying a penny to the ragged wretch who
+superfluously opened the valves of my hansom for me. My explanation to
+my soul was that I had no penny in my pocket, and that it would have
+been folly little short of crime to give so needy a wretch sixpence. But
+would it? Would it have corrupted him, since pauperize him further it
+could not? I advise the reader who finds himself in the like case to
+give the sixpence, and if he cares for the peace of my conscience, to
+make it a shilling; or, come! a half-crown, if he wishes to be truly
+handsome. It is astonishing how these regrets persist; but perhaps in
+this instance I owe the permanence of my pang to those frequent appeals
+to one's pity which repeated themselves in Sheffield. As I had noted at
+Liverpool I now noted at Sheffield that you cannot have great prosperity
+without having adversity, just as you cannot have heat without cold or
+day without dark. The one substantiates and verifies the other; and I
+perceived that wherever business throve it seemed to be at the cost of
+somebody; though even when business pines it is apparently no better.
+The thing ought to be looked into.
+
+At the moment of my visit to Sheffield, it happened that many works were
+running half-time or no time, and many people were out of work. At one
+place there was a little oblong building between branching streets,
+round which sat a miserable company of Murchers, as I heard them called,
+on long benches under the overhanging roof, who were too obviously, who
+were almost offensively, out of work. Some were old and some young, some
+dull and some fierce, some savage and some imbecile in their looks, and
+they were all stained and greasy and dirty, and looked their apathy or
+their grim despair. Even the men who were coming to or from their work
+at dinner-time looked stunted and lean and pale, with no color of that
+south of England bloom with which they might have favored a stranger.
+Slatternly girls and women abounded, and little babies carried about by
+a little larger babies, and of course kissed on their successive layers
+of dirt. There were also many small boys who, I hope, were not so wicked
+as they were ragged. At noon-time they hung much about the windows of
+cookshops which one would think their sharp hunger would have pierced
+to the steaming and smoking dishes within. The very morning after I had
+denied that man a penny at the theatre door, and was still smarting to
+think I had not given him sixpence, I saw a boy of ten, in the cut-down
+tatters of a man, gloating upon a meat-pie which a cook had cruelly set
+behind the pane in front of him. I took out the sixpence which I ought
+to have given that poor man, and made it a shilling, and put it into
+the boy's wonderfully dirty palm, and bade him go in and get the pie. He
+looked at me, and he looked at the shilling, and then I suppose he did
+as he was bid. But I ought to say, in justice to myself, that I never
+did anything of the kind again as long as I remained in Sheffield. I
+felt that I owed a duty to the place and must not go about corrupting
+the populace for my selfish pleasure.
+
+
+III
+
+Between our hotel and the main part of the town there yawned a black
+valley, rather nobly bridged, or viaducted, and beyond it in every
+direction the chimneys of the many works thickened in the perspectives.
+It was really like a dead forest, or like thick-set masts of shipping
+in a thronged port; or the vents of tellurian fires, which send up
+their flames by night and their smoke by day. It was splendid, it was
+magnificent, it was insurpassably picturesque. People must have painted
+it often, but if some bravest artist-soul would come, reverently, not
+patronizingly, and portray the sight in its naked ugliness, he would
+create one of the most beautiful masterpieces in the world. On our first
+morning the sun, when it climbed to the upper heavens, found a little
+hole in the dun pall, and shone down through it, and tried to pierce
+through the more immediate cloud above the works; but it could not, and
+it ended by shutting the hole under it, and disappearing.
+
+Beyond the foul avenues thridding the region of the works, and smelling
+of the decay of market-houses, were fine streets of shops and churches,
+and I dare say comely dwellings, with tram-cars ascending and descending
+their hilly slopes. The stores I find noted as splendid, and in my
+pocket-book I say that outside of the market-house, before you got to
+those streets, there are doves and guinea-pigs as well as a raven for
+sale in cages; and the usual horrible English display of flesh meats.
+The trams were one story, like our trolleys, without roof-seats, and
+there were plenty of them; but nothing could keep me, I suppose, till
+I had seen one of the works. Each of these stands in a vast yard, or
+close, by itself, with many buildings, and they are of all sorts; but
+I chose what I thought the most typical, and overcame the reluctance
+of the manager to let me see it. He said I had no idea what tricks were
+played by other makers to find out any new processes and steal them; but
+this was after I had pleaded my innocent trade of novelist, and assured
+him of my congenital incapability of understanding, much less conveying
+from the premises, the image of the simplest and oldest process. Then he
+gave me for guide an intelligent man who was a penknife-maker by trade,
+but was presently out of work, and glad to earn my fee.
+
+My guide proved a most decent, patient, and kindly person, and I hope
+it is no betrayal of confidence to say that he told me the men in
+these multitudinous shops work by the piece. The grinders furnish their
+grindstones and all their tools for making the knives; there is no dry
+grinding, such as used to fill the lungs of the grinders with deadly
+particles of steel and stone, and bring them to an early death; but
+sometimes a stone, which ordinarily lasts six months, will burst and
+drive the grinder through the roof. The blade-makers do their own
+forging and hammering, and it is from first to last apparently all
+hand-work. But it is head-work and heart-work too, and the men who
+wrought at it wrought with such intensity and constancy that they did
+not once look up or round where we paused to look on. I was made to know
+that trade was dull and work slack, and these fellows were lucky fellows
+to have anything to do. Still I did not envy them; and I felt it a
+distinct relief to pass from their shops into the cool, dim crypt which
+was filled with tusks of ivory, in all sizes from those of the
+largest father elephant to those of the babes of the herd; these were
+milk-tusks, I suppose. They get dearer as the elephants get scarcer; and
+that must have been why I paid as much for a penknife in the glittering
+showroom as it would have cost me in New York, with the passage money
+and the duties added. Because of the price, perhaps, I did not think of
+buying the two-thousand-bladed penknife I saw there; but I could never
+have used all the blades, now that we no longer make quill pens. I
+looked fondly at the maker's name on the knife I did buy, and said that
+the table cutlery of a certain small household which set itself up forty
+years ago had borne the same: but the pleasant salesman did not seem to
+feel the pathos of the fact so much as I.
+
+
+IV
+
+There is not only a vast deal of industry in Sheffield, but there is
+an unusual abundance of history, as there might very well be in a place
+that began life, in the usual English fashion, under the Britons and
+grew into municipal consciousness in the fostering care of the Romans
+and the ruder nurture of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Lords it had of
+the last, and the great line of the Earls of Shrewsbury presently rose
+and led Sheffield men back to battle in France, where the first earl
+fell on the bloody field, and so many of the men died with him in 1453
+that there was not a house in all the region which did not mourn a loss.
+Which of the Roses Sheffield held for, White or Red, I am not sure;
+but we will say that it duly suffered for one or the other; and it is
+certain that the great Cardinal Wolsey rested eighteen days at Sheffield
+Manor just before he went to die at Leicester; and Mary Queen of Scots
+spent fourteen years of sorrowful captivity, sometimes at the Manor
+and sometimes in Sheffield Castle. This hold was taken by the
+Parliamentarians in the Civil War; but the famous industries of the
+place had begun long before; so that Chaucer could say of one of his
+pilgrims,
+
+     "A Sheffield thwytel bare he in his hose."
+
+Thwytels, or whittles, figured in the broils and stage-plays of
+Elizabethan times, and three gross of them were exported from Liverpool
+in 1589, when the Sheffield penknife was already famed the best in the
+world. Manufactures flourished there apace when England turned to them
+from agriculture, and Sheffield is now a city of four hundred thousand
+or more. Apparently it has been growing radical, as the centres of
+prosperity and adversity always do, and the days of the Chartist
+agitation continued there for ten years, from 1839 till it came as near
+open rebellion as it well could in a plot for an armed uprising. Then
+that cause of the people, like many another, failed, and liberty there,
+as elsewhere in England, was fain to
+
+        "broaden slowly down
+     From precedent to precedent."
+
+Labor troubles, patient or violent, have followed, as labor troubles
+must, but leisure has always been equal to their pacification, and now
+Sheffield takes its adversity almost as quietly as its prosperity.
+
+[Illustration: TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD]
+
+
+V
+
+We were not there, though, for others' labor or leisure, which we have
+plenty of at home; but even before I appeased such conscience as I had
+about seeing a type of the works, we went a long drive up out of the
+town to that Manor where the poor, brilliant, baddish Scotch queen was
+imprisoned by her brilliant, baddish English cousin. In any question
+of goodness, there was little to choose between them; both were
+blood-stained liars; but it is difficult being a good woman and a queen
+too, and they only failed where few have triumphed. Mary is the more
+appealing to the fancy because she suffered beyond her deserts,
+but Elizabeth was to be pitied because Mary had made it politically
+imperative for her to kill her. All this we had threshed out many times
+before, and had said that, cat for cat, Mary was the more dangerous
+because she was the more feminine, and Elizabeth the more detestable
+because she was the more masculine in her ferocity. We were therefore
+in the right mood to visit Mary's prison, and we were both indignant and
+dismayed to find that our driver, called from a mews at a special price
+set upon his intelligence, had never heard of it and did not know where
+it was.
+
+We reported his inability to the head porter, who came out of the hotel
+in a fine flare of sarcasm. "You call yourself a Sheffield man and not
+know where the Old Manor is!" he began, and presently reduced that proud
+ignoramus of a driver to such a willingness to learn that we thought it
+at least safe to set out with him, and so started for the long climb
+up the hills that hold Sheffield in their hollow. When we reached their
+crest, we looked down and back through the clearer air upon as strange
+and grand a sight as could be. It was as if we were looking into the
+crater of a volcano, which was sending up its smoke through a thousand
+vents. All detail of the works and their chimneys was lost in the
+retrospect; one was aware only of a sort of sea of vapor through which
+they loomed and gloomed.
+
+Our ascent was mostly through winding and climbing streets of
+little dirty houses, with frowsy gardens beside them, and the very
+dirtiest-faced children in England playing about them. From time to time
+our driver had to ask his way of the friendly flat-bosomed slatterns,
+with babies in their arms, on their thresholds, or the women tending
+shop, or peddling provisions, who were all kind to him, and assured him
+with varying degrees of confidence that the Old Manor was a bit, or a
+goodish bit, beyond. All at once we came upon the sight of it on an open
+top, hard by what is left of the ruins of the real Manor, where Wolsey
+stayed that little while from death. The relics are broken walls, higher
+here, lower there; with some Tudor fireplaces showing through their
+hollow windows. What we saw in tolerable repair was the tower of the
+Manor, or the lodge, and we drove to it across a field, on a track made
+by farm carts, and presently kept by a dog that showed his teeth in a
+grin not wholly of amusement at our temerity. While we debated whether
+we had not better let the driver get down and knock, a farmer-like man
+came to the door and called the dog off. Then, in a rich North Country
+accent, he welcomed us to his kitchen parlor, where his wife was peeling
+potatoes for their midday dinner, and so led us up the narrow stone
+stairs of the tower to the chambers where Mary miserably passed those
+many long years of captivity.
+
+The rooms were visibly restored in every point where they could have
+needed restoration, but they were not ruthlessly or too insistently
+restored. There was even an antique chair, but when our guide was put on
+his honor as to whether it was one of the original chairs he answered,
+"Well, if people wanted a chair!" He was a rather charmingly quaint,
+humorous person, with that queer conscience, and he did not pretend to
+be moved by the hard inexorable stoniness of the place which had been
+a queen's prison for many years. One must not judge it too severely,
+though: bowers and prisons of that day looked much alike, and Mary
+Stuart may have felt this a bower, and only hated it because she could
+not get out of it, or anyhow break the relentless hold of that Earl and
+Countess of Shrewsbury whose captive guest she was, though she never
+ceased trying. We went up on the wide flat roof, of lead or stone,
+whither her feet must have so often heavily climbed, and looked out over
+the lovely landscape which she must have abhorred; and the wind that
+blew over it, in late August, was very cold; far colder than the air of
+the prison, or the bower, below.
+
+The place belongs now to the Duke of Norfolk, the great Catholic duke,
+and owes its restoration to his pity and his piety. Our farmer guide
+was himself a Protestant, but he spoke well of the duke, with whom he
+reported himself in such colloquies as, "I says to Dook," and, "Dook
+says to me." When he understood that we were Americans he asked after a
+son of his who had gone out to our continent twenty years before. He had
+only heard from him once, and that on the occasion of his being robbed
+of all his money by a roommate. It was in a place called Massatusy; we
+suggested Massachusetts, and he assented that such might be the place;
+and Mary's prison-house acquired an added pathos.
+
+
+VI
+
+We drove back through the beautiful park, the Duke of Norfolk's gift to
+Sheffield, which is plentifully provided, like all English towns, with
+public pleasure-grounds. They lie rather outside of it, but within it
+are many and many religious and civic edifices which merit to be seen.
+We chose as chiefest the ancient Parish Church, of Norman origin and
+modern restoration, where we visited the tomb of the Lord and Lady
+Shrewsbury who were Mary Stuart's jailers; or if they were not, a pair
+of their family were, and it comes to the same thing, emotionally. The
+chapel in which they lie is most beautiful, and the verger had just
+brushed the carpet within the chancel to such immaculate dustlessness
+that he could not bring himself to let us walk over it. He let us walk
+round it, and we saw the chapel as a favor, which we discharged with an
+abnormal tip after severe debate whether a person of this verger's rich
+respectability and perfect manner would take any tip at all. In the
+event it appeared that he would.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+NINE DAYS' WONDER IN YORK
+
+
+Perhaps it would be better to come to York somewhat earlier in the year
+than the 2d of September. By that time the English summer has suffered
+often if not severe discouragements. It has really only two months out
+of the year to itself, and even July and August are not always constant
+to it. To be sure, their defection cannot spoil it, but they dispose it
+to the slights of September in a dejection from which there is no rise
+to those coquetries with October known to our own summer. Yet, having
+said so much, I feel bound to add that our nine days in York, from the
+2d to the 12th of September, were more summer than autumn days, some
+wholly, some partly, with hours of sunshine keeping the flowers bright
+which the rain kept fresh. If you walked fast in this sunshine you were
+quite hot, and sometimes in the rain you were uncomfortably warm, or at
+least you were wet. If the mornings demanded a fire in the grate, the
+evenings were so clement that the lamp was sufficient, and the noons
+were very well with neither.
+
+
+I
+
+The day of our arrival in York began bright at Sheffield, where there
+was a man quarrelling so loudly and aimlessly in the station that we
+were glad to get away from him, as well as from the mountains of slag
+surrounding the iron metropolis. The train ran through a pass in these,
+and then we found ourselves in a plain country, and, though the day
+turned gray and misty, there seemed a sort of stored sunshine in the
+fields of wheat which the farmers were harvesting far and near. One has
+heard so much of the decay of the English agriculture that one sees
+what is apparently the contrary with nothing less than astonishment. The
+acreage of these wheat-fields was large, and the yield heavier than I
+could remember to have seen at home. Where the crop had been got in,
+much ploughing for the next year had been done already, and where the
+ploughing was finished the work of sowing by drill was going steadily
+forward, in the faith that such an unprecedented summer as was now
+passing would return another year. At all these pleasant labors, of
+course, the rooks were helping, or at least bossing.
+
+
+II
+
+We expected to stay certainly a week, and perhaps two weeks, in York,
+and our luck with railway hotels had been so smiling elsewhere that we
+had no other mind than to spend the time at the house into which we all
+but stepped from our train. But we had reckoned without our host, as he
+was represented by one of a half-dozen alert young ladies in the office,
+who asked how long we expected to stay, and when we expressed a general
+purpose of staying indefinitely, said that all her rooms were taken
+from the next Monday by people who had engaged them long before for
+the races. I did not choose to betray my ignorance to a woman, but
+I privately asked the head porter what races those were which were
+limiting our proposed sojourn, and I am now afraid he had some
+difficulty in keeping a head porter's conventional respect for a formal
+superior in answering that we had arrived on the eve of Doncaster Week.
+Then I said, "Oh yes," and affected the knowledge of Doncaster Week
+which I resolved to acquire by staying somewhere in York till it was
+over.
+
+But as yet, that Friday afternoon, there was no hurry, and, instead of
+setting about a search for lodgings at once, we drove up into the town,
+as soon as we had tea, and visited York Minster while it was still
+the gray afternoon and not yet the gray evening. I thought the hour
+fortunate, and I do not see yet how we could have chosen a better hour
+out of the whole twenty-four, for the inside or the outside of the
+glorious fane, the grandest and beautifulest in all England, as I felt
+then and I feel now. If I were put to the question and were forced to
+say in what its supreme grandeur and beauty lay, I should perhaps say in
+its most ample simplicity. No doubt it is full of detail, but I keep no
+sense of this from that mighty interior, with its tree-like, clustered
+pillars, and its measureless windows, like breadths of stained foliage
+in autumnal woodlands. You want the scale of nature for the Minster at
+York, and I cannot liken it to less than all-out-doors. Some cathedrals,
+like that of Wells, make you think of gardens; but York Minster will not
+be satisfied with less than an autumnal woodland, where the trees stand
+in clumps, with grassy levels about them, and with spacious openings to
+the sky, that let in the colored evening light.
+
+You could not get lost in it, for it was so free of all such
+architectural undergrowth as cumbers the perspectives of some
+cathedrals; besides, the afternoon of our visit there were so many other
+Americans that you could easily have asked your way in your own dialect.
+We loitered over its lengths and breadths, and wondered at its windows,
+which were like the gates of sunrise and sunset for magnitude, and
+lingered in a sumptuous delay from going into the choir, delighting in
+the gray twilight which seemed to gather from the gray walls inward,
+when suddenly what seemed a metallic curtain was dropped with a clash
+and the simultaneous up-flashing of electric bulbs inside it, and we
+were shut out from the sight but not the sound of the service that
+began in the choir. We could not wholly regret the incident, for as
+we recalled the like operation of religion in churches of our Italian
+travel, we were reminded how equally authoritative the Church of England
+and the Church of Home were, and how little they adjust their ceremonial
+to the individual, how largely to the collective worshipper. You could
+come into the Minster of York as into the basilica of St. Mark at Venice
+for a silent prayer amid the religious influences of the place, and be
+conscious of your oneness with your Source, as if there were no
+other one; but when the priesthood called you as one of many to your
+devotions, it was with the same imperative voice in both, and you must
+obey or be cut off from your chance. I suppose it is right; but somehow
+the down-clashing of that screen of the choir in the Minster at York
+seemed to exclude us with reproach, almost with ignominy.
+
+[Illustration: YORK MINSTER--THE GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND]
+
+We did what we could to repair our wounded self respect, and did not lay
+our exclusion up against the Minster itself, which I find that I noted
+as "scatteringly noble outside." By this I dare say I meant it had not
+that artistic unity of which I brought the impression from the inside.
+They were doing, as they were always doing, every where, with English
+cathedrals, something to one of the towers; but this only enhanced
+its scattering nobleness, for it left that greatly bescaffolded tower
+largely to the imagination, in which it soared sublimer, if anything,
+than its compeer. Most of the streets leading to and from the rather
+insufficient, irregular square where the Minster stands are lanes
+of little houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth, centuries, which
+collectively curved in their line, and not only overhung at their second
+stories, but bulged outward involuntarily from the weakness of age.
+They were all quite habitable, and some much later dwellings immediately
+surrounding the church were the favorite sojourn, apparently, of such
+strangers as could have rooms at the hotels only until the Monday of
+Doncaster Week.
+
+
+III
+
+During those limited days of the week before Doncaster, I was constantly
+coming back to the Minster, which is not the germ of political York, or
+hardly religious York; the brave city was a Romano-British capital and
+a Romano-British episcopal see centuries before the first wooden temple
+was built on the site of the present edifice in 627. I should like to
+make believe that we found traces of that simple church in the crypt of
+the Minster when we went the next morning and were herded through it by
+the tenderest of vergers. Most of our flock were Americans, and we put
+our guide to such question in matters of imagination and information
+as the patience of a less amiable shepherd would not have borne. Many a
+tale, true or o'ertrue, our verger had, which he told with unction; when
+he ascended with us to the body of the church, and said that the stained
+glass of the gigantic windows suffered from the depredations of the
+mistaken birds which pecked holes in the joints of their panes, I felt
+that I had full measure from him, pressed down and running over. I do
+not remember why he said the birds should have done this, but it seems
+probable that they took the mellow colors of the glass for those of ripe
+fruits.
+
+For myself, I could not get enough of those windows, in another sort
+of famine which ought at this time to have been sated. I was forever
+wondering at their grandeur outside and their glory inside. I was glad
+to lose my way about the town, for if I kept walking I was sure, sooner
+or later, to bring up at the Minster; but the last evening of our stay
+I made a purposed pilgrimage to it for a final emotion. It was the
+clearest evening we had in York, and at half-past six the sun was
+setting in a transparent sky, which somehow it did not flush with any of
+those glaring reds which the vulgarer sorts of sunsets are fond of, but
+bathed the air in a delicate suffusion of daffodil light, just tinged
+with violet. This was the best medium to see the past of the Minster in,
+and I can see it there now, if I did not then. I followed, or I follow,
+its veracious history back to the beginning of the seventh century,
+whence you can look back further still to the earliest Christian temples
+where the Romans worshipped with the Britons, whom they had enslaved
+and converted. But it was not till 627 that the little wooden chapel was
+built on the site of the Minster, to house the rite of the Northumbrian
+King Eadwine's baptism. He felt so happy in his new faith that he
+replaced the wooden structure with stone. In the next century it was
+burned, but rebuilt by another pious prince, and probably repaired by
+yet another after the Danes took the city a hundred years later. It
+was then in a good state to be destroyed by that devout William the
+Conqueror, who came to take the Saxon world in its sins of guttling
+and guzzling. The first Norman archbishop reconstructed or restored
+the church, and then it began to rise and to spread in glory--nave,
+transepts, and choir, and pillars and towers, Norman and Early English,
+and Perpendicular and Decorated--till it found itself at last what the
+American tourist sees it to-day. It suffered from two great fires in
+the nineteenth century, the first set by a lunatic who had the fancy of
+seeing it burn, but who had only the satisfaction of destroying part of
+the roof.
+
+It was never richly painted, but the color wanting in the walls and
+fretted vault was more than compensated by the mellowed splendors of
+the matchless windows. It was, indeed, fit to be the home of much more
+secular history than can be associated with it; but not till the end
+of the thirteenth century had the Minster a patron of its own, when St.
+William was canonized, and exercised his office, whatever it was, for
+two brief centuries. Then the Cromwell of Henry VIII. took possession
+of it in behalf of the crown, and the saint's charge was practically
+abolished. He was even deprived of his head, for the relic was encased
+in gold and jewels, and was therefore worth the king's having, who was
+most a friend of the reformed religion when it paid best. The later
+Cromwell, who beat a later king hard by at Marston Moor, must have
+somehow desecrated the Minster, though there is no record of any such
+fact. A more authentic monument of the religious difficulties of the
+times is the pastoral staff, bearing the arms of Catharine of Braganza,
+the poor little wife of Charles II., which was snatched from a Roman
+Catholic bishop when, to the high offence of Protestant piety, he was
+heading a procession in York in 1688. The verger showing us through the
+Minster was a good Protestant, but he held it bad taste in a predecessor
+of his, who when leading about a Catholic party of sight-seers took the
+captive staff from its place and shook it in their faces, saying, "Don't
+you wish you had it?"
+
+
+IV
+
+There is no telling to what lengths true religion, may rightly not go. I
+rather prize the incident as the sole fact concerning the Minster which
+I could make sure of even after repeated visits, and if I am indebted
+for my associations with it, long after the event, to Dr. Raine's
+scholarly and interesting sketch of York history, there is no reason
+why the better-informed reader should not accompany me in my last visit
+fully equipped. I walked slowly all round the structure, and fancied
+that I got a new sense of grandeur in the effect of the east window,
+which was, at any rate, more impressive than the north window. It was
+a long walk, almost the measure of such a walk as one should take after
+supper for one's health, and it had such incidents as many pauses for
+staring up at the many restorations going on. From point to point the
+incomparable Perpendicular Gothic carried the eye to the old gargoyles
+of the caves and towers waiting to be replaced by the new gargoyles,
+which lay in open-mouthed grimacing in the grass at the bases of the
+church. While I stood noting both, and thinking the chances were that I
+should never look on York Minster again, and feeling the luxurious pang
+of it, a verger in a skull-cap was so good as to come to a side door and
+parley long and pleasantly with a policeman. The simple local life went
+on around; people going to or from supper passed me; kind, vulgar
+noises came from the little houses bulging over the narrow, neighboring
+streets; there seemed to be the stamping of horses in a stable, and
+there was certainly the misaspirated talk about them. I could not have
+asked better material for the humble emotions I love; and I was more
+than content on my way home to find myself one of the congregation
+at the loud devotions of a detachment of the Salvation Army. After a
+battering of drums and a clashing of cymbals and a shouting of hymns,
+the worship settled to the prayer of a weak brother, who was so long in
+supplication that the head exhorter covered a yawn with his hand, and at
+the first sign of relenting in the supplicant bade the drums and cymbals
+strike up. Then, after a hymn, a sister, such a very plain, elderly
+sister, with hardly a tooth or an aitch in her head, began to relate her
+religious history. It appeared that she had been a much greater sinner
+than she looked, and that the mercy shown her had been proportionate.
+She was vain both of her sins and mercies, poor soul, and in her scrimp
+figure, with its ill-fitting uniform, Heaven knows how long she went on.
+I was distracted by a clergyman passing on the outside of the ring of
+listening women and children, and looking, I chose to think, somewhat
+sourly askance at the distasteful ceremonial. I wished to stop him,
+on his way to the Minster, if that was his way, and tell him that so
+Christianity must have begun, and so the latest form of it must
+always begin and work round after ages and ages to the beauty and
+respectability his own ritual has. But I now believe this would have
+been the greatest impertinence and hypocrisy, for I myself found the
+performance before us as tasteless and tawdry as he could possibly have
+done. He was going toward the Minster, and it would make him forget it;
+but I was going away from it, perhaps, for the last time, and this loud
+side-show of religion would make me forget the Minster.
+
+
+V
+
+Our railway hotel lay a little way out of the town, and after a day's
+sight-seeing we were to meet or mingle with troops of wholesome-looking
+workmen whose sturdiness and brightness were a consolation after
+the pale debility of labor's looks in Sheffield. From the
+chocolate-factories or the railroad-shops, which are the chief
+industries of York, they would be crossing the bridge of the Ouse, the
+famous stream on which the Romans had their town, and which suggested to
+the Anglicans to call their Eboracum Eurewic--a town on a river. In due
+time the Danes modified this name to Yerik, and so we came honestly by
+the name of our own New York, called after the old York, as soon as the
+English had robbed the Dutch of it, and the King of England had given
+the province to his brother the Duke of York. Both cities are still
+towns on rivers, but the Ouse is no more an image or forecast of the
+Hudson than Old York is of New York. For that reason, the bridge over
+it is not to be compared to our Brooklyn Bridge, or even to any bridge
+which is yet to span the Hudson. The difference is so greatly in our
+favor that we may well yield our city's mother the primacy in her city
+wall. We have ourselves as yet no Plantagenet wall, and we have not yet
+got a mediaeval gate through which the traveller passes in returning
+from the Flatiron Building to his hotel in the Grand Central Station.
+
+We do not begin to have such a hoar antiquity as is articulate in the
+mother city, speaking with muted voices from the innumerable monuments
+which the earth has yielded from the site of our hotel and its adjacent
+railway station. All underground York is doubtless fuller of Home than
+even Bath is; and it has happened that her civilization was much more
+largely dug up here than elsewhere when the foundations of the spreading
+edifices were laid. The relics are mainly the witnesses of pagan Rome,
+but Christianity politically began in York, as it has politically ended
+in New York, and doubtless some soldiers of the Sixth Legion and many of
+the British slaves were religiously Christians in the ancient metropolis
+before Constantine was elected emperor there.
+
+I have been in many places where history is hospitably at home and is
+not merely an unwilling guest, as in our unmemoried land. Florence is
+very well, Venice is not so bad, Naples has her long thoughts, and Milan
+is mediaeval-minded, not to speak of Genoa, or Marseilles, or Paris, or
+those romantic German towns where the legends, if not the facts, abound;
+but, after all, for my pleasure in the past, I could not choose any
+place before York. You need not be so very definite in your knowledge.
+The event of Constantine's presence and election is so spacious as to
+leave no room for particulars in the imagination; and you are so rich in
+it that you will even reject them from your thoughts, as you sit in
+the close-cropped flowery lawn of your hotel garden (try to imagine a
+railroad hotel garden in _New_ York!) on the sunniest of the afternoons
+before you are turned out for Doncaster Week, and, while you watch
+a little adventurous American boy climbing over a pile of rock-work,
+realize the most august, the most important fact in the story of the
+race as native to the very air you are breathing! Where you sit you are
+in full view of the Minster, which is to say in view of something like
+the towers and battlements of the celestial city. Or if you wake
+very early on a morning still nearer the fatal Doncaster Week of your
+impending banishment, and look out of your lofty windows at the sunrise
+reddening the level bars of cloud behind the Minster, you shall find it
+bulked up against the pearl-gray masses of the sunny mist which hangs
+in all the intervening trees, and solidifies them in unbroken masses of
+foliage. All round your hotel spreads a gridiron of railroad, yet such
+is the force of the English genius for quiet that you hear no clatter of
+trains; the expresses whir in and out of the station with not more noise
+than humming-birds; and amid this peace the past has some chance with
+modernity. The Britons dwell, unmolested by our latter-day clamor, in
+their wattled huts and dugouts; the Romans come and make them slaves and
+then Christians, and after three or four hundred years send word from
+the Tiber to the Ouse that they can stay no longer, and so leave them
+naked to their enemies, the Picts and Scots and Saxons and Angles; and
+in due course come the ravaging and burning Danes; and in due course
+still, the murdering and plundering and scorning Normans. But all so
+quietly, like the humming-bird-like expresses, with a kind of railway
+celerity in the foreshortened retrospect; and after the Normans have
+crushed themselves down into the mass of the vanquished, and formed the
+English out of the blend, there follow the many wars of the successions,
+of the Roses, of the Stuarts, with all the intermediate insurrections
+and rebellions. In the splendid Histories of Shakespeare, which are
+full of York, the imagination visits and revisits the place, and you are
+entreated by mouth of one of his princely personages,
+
+     "I pray you let us satisfy our eyes
+      With the memorials and things of fame,
+      That do renown this city,"
+
+where his Henrys and Richards and Margarets and Edwards and Eleanors
+abide still and shall forever abide while the English speech lasts.
+
+[Illustration: BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER]
+
+
+VI
+
+Something of all this I knew, and more pretended, with a mounting
+indignation at the fast-coming Doncaster Week which was to turn us out
+of our hotel. We began our search for other lodgings with what seemed to
+be increasing failure. The failure had consolation in it so far as the
+sweet regret of people whose apartments were taken could console. They
+would have taken us at other hotels for double the usual price, but,
+when we showed ourselves willing to pay, it proved that they had
+no rooms at any price. From house to house, then, we went, at first
+vaingloriously, in the spaces about the Minster, and then meekly into
+any side street, wherever the legend of Apartments showed itself in a
+transom. At last, the second day, after being denied at seven successive
+houses, we found quite the refuge we wanted in the Bootham, which means
+very much more than the ignorant reader can imagine. Our upper rooms
+looked on a pretty grassy garden space behind, where there was sun when
+there was sun, and in front on the fine old brick dwellings of a most
+personable street, with a sentiment of bygone fashion. At the upper end
+of it was a famous city gate--Bootham Bar, namely--with a practicable
+portcullis, which we verified at an early moment by going up into "the
+chamber over the gate," where it was once worked, and whence its lower
+beam, set thick with savage spikes, was dropped. Outside the gate there
+was a sign in the wall saying that guards were to be had there to guide
+travellers through the Forest of Galtres beyond Bootham, and keep them
+from the wolves. Now woods and wolves and guards are all gone, and
+Bootham Bar is never closed.
+
+The upper room is a passageway for people who are walking round the town
+on the Plantagenet wall, and one morning we took this walk in sunshine
+that befitted the Sabbath. Half the children of York seemed to be taking
+it, too, with their good parents, who had stayed away from church to
+give them this pleasure, the fathers putting on their frock-coats and
+top-hats, which are worn on no other days in the provincial cities of
+England. For a Plantagenet wall, that of York is in excellent repair,
+and it is very clean, so that the children could not spoil their Sunday
+best by clambering on the parapet, and trying to fall over it. There
+was no parapet on the other side, and they could have fallen over that
+without trouble; but it would not have served the same purpose; for
+under the parapet there were the most alluringly ragged little boys,
+with untidy goats and delightfully dirty geese. There was no trace of a
+moat outside the wall, where pleasant cottages pressed close to it
+with their gardens full of bright flowers. At one point there were
+far-spreading sheep and cattle pens, where there is a weekly market, and
+at another the old Norman castle which cruel Conqueror William built to
+hold the city, and which has suffered change, not unpicturesque,
+into prisons for unluckier criminals, and the Assize Courts for their
+condemnation. From time to time the wall left off, and then we got down,
+perforce, and walked to the next piece of it. In these pieces we
+made the most of the old gates, especially Walmgate Bar, which has a
+barbican. I should be at a loss to say why the barbican should have
+commended it so; perhaps it was because we there realized, for the first
+time, what a barbican was; I doubt if the reader knows, now. Otherwise,
+I should have preferred Monk Bar or Micklegate Bar, as being more like
+those I was used to in the theatre. But we came back gladly to Bootham
+Bar, holding that a portcullis was equal any day to a barbican, and
+feeling as if we had got home in the more familiar neighborhood.
+
+There were small shops in the Bootham, thread-and-needle stores,
+newspaper stores, and provision stores mainly, which I affected, and
+there was one united florist's and fruiterer's which I particularly
+liked because of the conversability of the proprietor. He was a stout
+man, of a vinous complexion, with what I should call here, where our
+speech is mostly uncouth, an educated accent, though with few and
+wandering aspirates in it. Him I visited every morning to buy for my
+breakfast one of those Spanish melons which they have everywhere in
+England, and which put our native cantaloupes to shame; and we always
+fell into a little talk over our transaction of fourpence or sixpence,
+as the case might be. After I had confided that I was an American, he
+said one day, "Ah, the Americans are clever people." Then he added,
+"I hope you won't mind my saying it, sir, but I think their ladies are
+rather harder than our English ladies, sir."
+
+"Yes," I eagerly assented. "How do you mean? Sharper? Keener?"
+
+"Well, not just that, sir."
+
+"More practical? More business-like?" I pursued.
+
+"Well, I shouldn't like to say that, sir. But--they seem rather harder,
+sir; at least, judging from what I see of them in York, sir. Rather
+harder, sir."
+
+We remained not the less friends with that mystery between us; and I
+bought my last melon of him on my last morning, when the early September
+had turned somewhat sharply chill. That turn made me ask what the winter
+was in York, and he boasted it very cold, with ice and snow aplenty,
+and degrees of frost much like our own. But apparently those York women
+resisted it and remained of a tenderness which contrasted to their
+advantage with the summer hardness of our women.
+
+
+VII
+
+It was a pleasure, which I should be glad to share with the reader, to
+lose one's self in the streets of York. They were all kinds of streets
+except straight, and they seemed not to go anywhere except for the
+joke of bringing the wayfarer unexpectedly back to, or near, his
+starting-point and far from his goal. The blame of their vagariousness,
+if it was a fault, is put upon the Danes, who found York when they
+captured it very rectangular, for so the Romans built it, and so the
+Angles kept it; but nothing would serve the Danes but to crook its
+streets and call them gates, so that the real gates of the city have to
+be called bars, or else the stranger might take them for streets. If he
+asked another wayfarer, he could sometimes baffle the streets, and get
+to the point he aimed at, but, whether he did or not, he could always
+amuse himself in them; they would take a friendly interest in him,
+and show him the old houses and churches which the American stranger
+prefers. They abound in the poorer sorts of buildings, of course, just
+as they do in the poorer sorts of people, but in their simpler courts
+and squares and expanses they have often dignified mansions of that
+Georgian architecture which seems the last word in its way, and which is
+known here in our older edifices as there in their newer. Some of them
+are said to have "richly carved ceilings, wainscoted, panelled rooms,
+chimneypieces with paintings framed in the over-mantel, dentilled
+cornices, and pedimented doors," and I could well believe it, as I
+passed them with an envious heart. There were gardens behind these
+mansions which hung their trees over the spiked coping of their
+high-shouldered walls and gates, and sequestered I know not what damp
+social events in their flowery and leafy bounds.
+
+[Illustration: WALMGATE BAR HAS A BARBICAN]
+
+At times I distinctly wished to know something of the life of York, but
+I was not in the way of it. The nearest to an acquaintance I had there,
+besides my critical fruiterer, was the actor whose name I recognized on
+his bills as that of a brave youth who had once dramatized a novel of
+mine, and all too briefly played the piece, and who was now to come
+to York for a week of Shakespeare. Perhaps I could not forgive him the
+recrudescence; at any rate, I did not try to see him, and there was no
+other social chance for me, except as I could buy in for a few glimpses
+at the tidy confectioners', where persons of civil condition resorted
+for afternoon tea. Even to these one could not speak, and I could only
+do my best in a little mercenary conversation with the bookseller about
+York histories. The bookstores were not on our scale, and generally the
+shops in York were not of the modern department type, but were perhaps
+the pleasanter for that reason.
+
+In my earlier wanderings I made the acquaintance of a most agreeable
+market-place, stretching the length of two squares, which on a Saturday
+afternoon I found filled with every manner of bank and booth and
+canopied counter, three deep, and humming pleasantly with traffic in
+everything one could eat, drink, wear, or read; there seemed as many
+book-stalls as fruit-stalls. What I noted equally with the prettiness
+of the abounding flowers was the mild kindness of the market-people's
+manners and their extreme anxiety to state exactly the quality of the
+things they had for sale. They seemed incapable of deceit, but I do
+not say they really were so. My own transactions were confined to the
+purchase of some golden-gage plums, and I advise the reader rather to
+buy greengages; the other plums practised the deception in their looks
+which their venders abhorred.
+
+
+VIII
+
+I wandered in a perfectly contemporary mood through the long ranks and
+lanes of the marketplace, and did not know till afterward that at one
+end of it, called the Pavement, the public executions used to take place
+for those great or small occasions which brought folks to the block or
+scaffold in the past. I had later some ado to verify the dismal fact
+from a cluster of people before a tavern who seemed to be taking bets
+for the Doncaster Week, and I could hardly keep them from booking me
+for this horse or that when I merely wanted to know whether it was on a
+certain spot the Earl of Northumberland had his head cut off for leading
+a rising against Henry IV.; or some such execution.
+
+What riches of story has not York to browbeat withal the storyless
+New-Yorker who visits her! That Henry IV. was he whom I had lately seen
+triumphing near Shrewsbury in the final battle of the Roses, where the
+Red was so bloodily set above the White; and it was his poetic fancy
+to have Northumberland, when he bade him come to York, pass through the
+gateway on which the head of his son, Hotspur Harry, was festering. No
+wonder the earl led a rising against his liege, who had first mercifully
+meant to imprison him for life, and then more mercifully pardoned him.
+But there seems to have been fighting up and down the centuries from the
+beginning, in York, interspersed with praying and wedding and feasting.
+After the citizens drove out Conqueror William's garrison, and Earl
+Waltheof provided against the Normans' return by standing at the castle
+gate and chopping their heads off with his battle-axe as they came
+forth, William efficaciously devastated the city and the country as far
+as Durham. His son William gave it a church, and that "worthy peer,"
+King Stephen, a hospital. In his time the archbishop and barons of York
+beat the Scotch hard by, and the next Scotch king had to do homage to
+Henry II. at York for his kingdom. Henry III. married his sister at York
+to one Scotch king and his daughter to that king's successor. Edward I.
+and his queen Eleanor honored with their presence the translation of St.
+William's bones to the Minster; Edward II. retreated from his defeat at
+Bannockburn to York, and Edward III. was often there for a king's
+varied occasions of fighting and feasting. Weak Henry VI. and his wilful
+Margaret, after their defeat at Towton by Edward IV., escaped from the
+city just in time, and Edward entered York under his own father's head
+on Micklegate Bar. Richard III. was welcomed there before his rout and
+death at Bosworth, and was truly mourned by the citizens. Henry VII.
+wedded Elizabeth, the "White Rose of York," and afterward visited her
+city; Mary, Queen of Scots, was once in hiding there, and her uncouth
+son stayed two nights in York on his way to be crowned James I. in
+London. His son, Charles I., was there early in his reign, and touched
+many for the king's evil; later, he was there again, but could not cure
+the sort of king's evil which raged past all magic in the defeat of his
+followers at Marston Moor by Cromwell. The city yielded to the Puritans,
+whose temperament had already rather characterized it. James II., as
+Duke of York, made it his brief sojourn; "proud Cumberland," returning
+from Culloden after the defeat of the Pretender, visited the city
+and received its freedom for destroying the last hope of the Stuarts;
+perhaps the twenty-two rebels who were then put to death in York were
+executed in the very square where those wicked men thought I was wanting
+to play the horses. The reigning family has paid divers visits to the
+ancient metropolis, which was the capital of Britain before London was
+heard of. The old prophecy of her ultimate primacy must make time if
+it is to fulfil itself and increase York's seventy-two thousand beyond
+London's six million.
+
+
+IX
+
+I should be at a loss to say why its English memories haunted my York
+less than the Roman associations of the place. They form, however,
+rather a clutter of incidents, whereas the few spreading facts of
+Hadrian's stay, the deaths of Severus and Constantius, and the election
+of Constantine, his son, enlarge themselves to the atmospheric compass
+of the place, but leave a roominess in which the fancy may more
+commodiously orb about. I was on terms of more neighborly intimacy
+with the poor Punic emperor than with any one else in York, doubtless
+because, when he fell sick, he visited the temple of Bellona near
+Bootham Bar, and paid his devotions unmolested, let us hope, by any
+prevision of the misbehavior of his son Caracalla (whose baths I had
+long ago visited at Rome) in killing his other son Geta. Everywhere I
+could be an early Christian, in company with Constantine, in whom the
+instinct of political Christianity must have begun to stir as soon as he
+was chosen emperor. But I dare say I heard the muted tramp of the Sixth
+Legion about the Yorkish streets above all other martial sounds because
+I stayed as long as Doncaster Week would let me in the railway hotel,
+which so many of their bones made room for when the foundations of it
+were laid, with those of the adherent station. Their bones seem to
+have been left there, after the disturbance, but their sepulchres were
+respectfully transferred to the museum of the Philosophical Society, in
+the grounds where the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey rise like fragments
+of pensive music or romantic verse, inviting the moonlight and the
+nightingale, but, wanting these, make shift with the noonday and the
+babies in perambulators neglected by nurse-girls reading novels.
+
+[Illustration: ST. MARY'S ABBEY]
+
+The babies and the nurses are not allowed in the museum of antiquities,
+which is richer in Roman remains than any that one sees outside of
+Italy. There are floors of mosaic, large and perfect, taken from the
+villas which people are always digging up in the neighborhood of York,
+and, from the graves uncovered in the railway excavations, coffins of
+lead and stone for civilians, and of rude tiles for the soldiers of the
+Sixth Legion; the slaves were cast into burial-pits of tens and twenties
+and left to indiscriminate decay till they should be raised in the
+universal incorruption. Probably the slaves were the earliest Christians
+at York; certainly the monuments are pagan, as the inmates of the tombs
+must have been. Some of the monuments bear inscriptions from loving
+wives and husbands to the partners they have lost, and some of the stone
+coffins are those of children. It is all infinitely touching, and after
+two thousand years the heart aches for the fathers and mothers who laid
+their little ones away in these hard cradles for their last sleep.
+Faith changes, but constant death remains the same, and life is not very
+different in any age, when it comes to the end. The Roman exiles who had
+come so far to hold my British ancestors in subjection to their alien
+rule seemed essentially not only of the same make as me, but the
+same civilization. Their votive altars and inscriptions to other gods
+expressed a human piety of like anxiety and helplessness with ours, and
+called to a like irresponsive sky. A hundred witnesses of their mortal
+state--jars and vases and simple household utensils--fill the shelves of
+the museum; but the most awful, the most beautiful appeal of the past is
+in that mass of dark auburn hair which is kept here in a special urn and
+uncovered for your supreme emotion. It is equally conjectured to be the
+hair of a Roman lady or of a British princess, but is of a young girl
+certainly, dressed twenty centuries ago for the tomb in which it was
+found, and still faintly lucent with the fashionable unguent of the day,
+and kept in form by pins of jet. One thinks of the little, slender hands
+that used to put them there, and of the eyes that confronted themselves
+in the silver mirror under the warm shadow that the red-gold mass
+cast upon the white forehead. This sanctuary of the past was the most
+interesting place in that most interesting city of York, and the day of
+our first visit a princess of New York sat reading a book in the midst
+of it, waiting for the rain to be over, which was waiting for her to
+come out and then begin again. We knew her from having seen her at the
+station in relation to some trunks bearing her initials and those of
+her native city; and she could be about the age of the York princess or
+young Roman lady whose hair was kept in the urn hard by.
+
+
+X
+
+There is in York a little, old, old church, whose dear and reverend
+name I have almost forgotten, if ever I knew it, but I think it is Holy
+Trinity Goodramgate, which divides the heart of my adoration with the
+Minster. We came to it quite by accident, one of our sad September
+afternoons, after we had been visiting the Guildhall, Venetianly
+overhanging the canal calm of the Ouse, and very worthy to be seen for
+its York histories in stained glass. The custodian had surprised us and
+the gentlemen of the committee by taking us into the room where they
+were investigating the claims of the registered voters to the suffrage;
+and so, much entertained and instructed, we issued forth, and, passing
+by the church in which Guy Fawkes was baptized, only too ineffectually,
+we came quite unexpectedly upon Holy Trinity Goodramgate, if that and
+not another is indeed its name.
+
+It stands sequestered in a little leafy and grassy space of its own,
+with a wall hardly overlooked on one side by low stone cottages, the
+immemorial homes of rheumatism and influenza. The church had the air
+of not knowing that it is of Perpendicular and Decorated Gothic, with
+a square, high-shouldered tower, as it bulks up to a very humble
+height from the turf to the boughs overhead, or that it has a nice
+girl sketching its doorway, where a few especially favored weddings and
+funerals may enter. It is open once a year for service, and when the
+tourist will, or can, for the sight of the time-mellowed, beautiful
+stained glass of its eastward window. The oaken pews are square and
+high-shouldered, like the low church tower; and, without, the soft
+yellow sandstone is crumbling away from the window traceries. The church
+did not look as if it felt itself a thousand years old, and perhaps it
+is not; but I never was in a place where I seemed so like a ghost of
+that antiquity. I had a sense of haunting it, in the inner twilight and
+the outer sunlight, where a tender wind was stirring the leaves of its
+embowering trees and scattering them on the graves of my eleventh and
+twelfth century contemporaries.
+
+
+XI
+
+We chose the sunniest morning we could for our visit to Clifford's
+Tower, which remains witness of the Norman castle the Conqueror built
+and rebuilt to keep the Danish-Anglian-Roman-British town in awe. But
+the tower was no part of the original castle, and only testifies of it
+by hearsay. That was built by Roger de Clifford, who suffered death with
+his party chief, the Earl of Lancaster, when Edward of York took the
+city, and it is mainly memorable as the refuge of the Jews whom the
+Christians had harried out of their homes. They had grown in numbers and
+riches, when the Jew-hate of 1190 broke out in England, as from time
+to time the Jew-hate breaks out in Russia now, to much the same cruel
+effect. They were followed and besieged in the castle, and, seeing that
+they must be captured, they set fire to the place, and five hundred slew
+themselves. Some that promised to be Christians came out and were killed
+by their brethren in Christ. In New York the Christians have grown
+milder, and now they only keep the Jews out of their clubs and their
+homes.
+
+[Illustration: CLIFFORD'S TOWER]
+
+The Clifford Tower leans very much to one side, so that as you ascend it
+for the magnificent view from the top you have to incline yourself the
+other way, as you do in the Tower of Pisa, to help it keep its balance.
+The morning of our visit, so gay in its forgetfulness of the tragical
+past, we found the place in charge of an old soldier, an Irishman who
+had learned, as custodian, a professional compassion for those poor Jews
+of nine hundred years ago, and, being moved by our confession of our
+nationality, owned to three "nevvies" in New Haven. So small is the
+world and so closely knit in the ties of a common humanity and a common
+citizenship, native and adoptive!
+
+The country around York looked so beautiful from Clifford's Tower that
+we would not be satisfied till we had seen it closer, and we chose a
+bright, cool September afternoon for our drive out of the town and over
+the breezy, high levels which surround it. The first British capital
+could hardly have been more nobly placed, and one could not help
+grieving that the Ouse should have indolently lost York that early
+dignity by letting its channel fill up with silt and spoil its
+navigation. The Thames managed better for York's upstart rival London,
+and yet the Ouse is not destitute of sea or river craft. These were of
+both steam and sail, and I myself have witnessed the energy with which
+the reluctance of the indolent stream is sometimes overcome. I do not
+suppose that anywhere else, when the wind is low, is a vessel madly
+hurled through the water at a mile an hour by means of a rope tied
+to its mast and pulled by a fatherly old horse under the intermittent
+drivership of two boys whom he could hardly keep to the work. I loved
+the banks of a stream where one could see such a triumph of man over
+nature, and where nature herself was so captivating. All that grassy
+and shady neighborhood seemed a public promenade, where on a Sunday one
+could see the lower middle classes in their best and brightest, and
+it had for all its own the endearing and bewitching name of Ings. Why
+cannot we have Ings by the Hudson side?
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TWO YORKISH EPISODES
+
+
+Certainly I had not come to York, as certainly I would not have gone
+anywhere, for battle-fields, but becoming gradually sensible in that
+city that the battle of Marston Moor was fought a few miles away, and
+my enemy Charles I. put to one of his worst defeats there, I bought a
+third-class ticket and ran out to the place one day for whatever emotion
+awaited me there.
+
+
+I
+
+At an English station you are either overwhelmed with transportation,
+or you are without any except such as you were born with, and at the
+station for Marston Moor I asked for a fly in vain. But it was a most
+walkable afternoon, and the pleasant road into the region which the
+station-master indicated as that I was seeking invited the foot by its
+level stretch, sometimes under wayside trees, but mostly between open
+fields, newly reaped and still yellow with their stubble, or green with
+the rowen clover. Sometimes it ran straight and sometimes it curved,
+but it led so rarely near any human habitation that one would rather not
+have met any tramps beside one's self on it. Presently I overtook one, a
+gentle old farm-wife, a withered blonde, whom I helped with the bundles
+she bore in either hand, in the hope that she could tell me whether I
+was near Marston Moor or not. But she could tell me only, what may have
+been of higher human interest, that her husband had the grass farm of
+a hundred and fifty acres, which we were coming to, for seventy-five
+pounds a year; and they had their own cattle, sheep, and horses, and
+were well content with themselves. She excused herself for not knowing
+more than vaguely of the battle-field, as not having been many years
+in the neighborhood; and being now come to a gate in the fields, she
+thanked me and took her way up a grassy path to the pleasant farmhouse I
+saw in the distance.
+
+It must have been about this time that it rained, having shone long
+enough for English weather, and it hardly held up before I was overtaken
+by a friendly youth on a bicycle, whom I stayed with the question
+uppermost in my mind. He promptly got off his wheel to grapple with the
+problem. He was a comely young fellow, an artisan of some sort from
+a neighboring town, and he knew the country well, but he did not know
+where my lost battle-field was. He was sure that it was near by: but he
+was sure there was no monument to mark the spot. Then we parted friends,
+with many polite expressions, and he rode on and I walked on.
+
+For a mile and more I met no other wayfarer, and as I felt that it was
+time to ask for Marston Moor again, I was very glad to be overtaken by
+a gentleman driving in a dog-cart, with his pretty young daughter on
+the wide seat with him. He halted at sight of the elderly pilgrim, and
+hospitably asked if he could not give him a lift, alleging that there
+was plenty of room. He was interested in my search, which he was not
+able definitely to promote, but he believed that if I would drive with
+him to his place I could find the battle-field, and, anyhow, I could get
+a trap back from the The Sun. I pleaded the heat I was in from walking,
+and the danger for an old fellow of taking cold in a drive through the
+cool air; and then, as old fellows do, we bantered each other about
+our ages, each claiming to be older than the other, and the kind, sweet
+young girl sat listening with that tolerance of youth for the triviality
+of age which is so charming. When he could do no more, he said he was
+sorry, and wished me luck, and drove on; and I being by this time tired
+with my three miles' tramp, took advantage of a wayside farmhouse, the
+first in all the distance, and went in and asked for a cup of tea.
+
+The farm-wife, who came in out of her back garden to answer my knock,
+pleaded regretfully that her fire was down; but she thought I could
+get tea at the next house; and she was very conversable about the
+battle-field. She did not know just where it was, but she was sure it
+was quite a mile farther on; and at that I gave up the hope of it along
+with the tea. This is partly the reader's loss, for I have no doubt
+I could have been very graphic about it if I had found it; but as for
+Marston Moor, I feel pretty certain that if it ever existed it does not
+now. A moor, as I understand, implies a sort of wildness, but nothing
+could be more domestic than the peaceful fields between which I had come
+so far, and now easily found my way back to the station. Easily, I say,
+but there was one point where the road forked, though I was sure it
+had not forked before, and I felt myself confronted with some sort,
+any sort, of exciting adventure. By taking myself firmly in hand, and
+saying, "It was yonder to the left where I met my kind bicycler, and we
+vainly communed of my evanescent battle-field," and so keeping on, I got
+safely to the station with nothing more romantic in my experience than a
+thrilling apprehension.
+
+
+II
+
+I quite forgot Marston Moor in my self-gratulation and my recognition
+of the civility from every one which had so ineffectively abetted my
+search. Simple and gentle, how hospitable they had all been to my vain
+inquiry, and how delicately they had forborne to visit the stranger
+with the irony of the average American who is asked anything, especially
+anything he does not know! I went thinking that the difference was a
+difference between human nature long mellowed to its conditions, and
+human nature rasped on its edges and fretted by novel circumstances to a
+provisional harshness. I chose to fancy that unhuman nature sympathized
+with the English mood; in the sheep bleating from the pastures I heard
+the note of Wordsworth's verse; and by the sky, hung in its low
+blue with rough, dusky clouds, I was canopied as with a canvas of
+Constable's.
+
+It was the more pity, then, that at the station a shooting party,
+approaching from the other quarter with their servants and guns and
+dogs, and their bags of hares and partridges, should have given English
+life another complexion to the wanderer so willing to see it always
+rose color. The gunners gained the station platform first, and at once
+occupied the benches, strewing all the vacant places with their still
+bleeding prey. I did not fail of the opportunity to see in them the
+arrogance of class, which I had hitherto so vainly expected, and I
+disabled their looks by finding them as rude as their behavior. How
+different they were from the kind bicycler, or the gentleman in the
+dog-cart, or either one of the farm-wives who sorrowed so civilly not to
+know where my lost battle-field was!
+
+In England, it is always open to the passenger to enforce a claim to
+his share of the public facilities, but I chose to go into the licensed
+victualler's next the station and sit down to a peaceable cup of tea
+rather than contest a place on that bloody benching; and so I made the
+acquaintance of an interior out of literature, such as my beloved Thomas
+Hardy likes to paint. On a high-backed rectangular settle rising against
+the wall, and almost meeting in front of the comfortable range, sat a
+company of rustics, stuffing themselves with cold meat, washed down with
+mugs of ale, and cozily talking. They gained indefinitely in my interest
+from being served by a lame woman, with a rhythmical limp, and I hope it
+was not for my demerit that I was served apart in the chillier parlor,
+when I should have liked so much to stay and listen to the rustic tale
+or talk. The parlor was very depressingly papered, but on its walls I
+had the exalted company of his Majesty the King, their Royal Highnesses
+the Prince and Princess of Wales, the late Premier, the Marquis of
+Salisbury, and, for no assignable reason except a general fitness for
+high society, the twelve Apostles in Da Vinci's _Last Supper_, together
+with an appropriate view of York Minster.
+
+
+III
+
+I do not pretend this search for the battle-field of Marston Moor was
+the most exciting episode of my stay in York. In fact, I think it
+was much surpassed in a climax of dramatic poignancy incident to our
+excursion to Bishopsthorpe, down the Ouse, on one of the cosey little
+steamers which ply the stream without unreasonably crowding it against
+its banks. It was a most silvery September afternoon when we started
+from the quay at York, and after escaping from embarkment on a boat
+going in the wrong direction, began, with no unseemly swiftness, to
+scuttle down the current. It was a perfect voyage, as perfect as any I
+ever made on the Mississippi, the Ohio, the St. Lawrence, or the Hudson,
+on steamers in whose cabins our little boat would have lost itself. We
+had a full but not crowded company of passengers, overflowing into
+a skiff at our stern, in which a father and mother, with three women
+friends, preferred the high excitement of being towed to Bishopsthorpe,
+where it seemed that the man of the party knew the gardener. With each
+curve of the river and with each remove we got the city in more and more
+charming retrospective, till presently its roofs and walls and spires
+and towers were lost in the distance, and we were left to the sylvan
+or pastoral loveliness of the low shores. Here and there at a pleasant
+interval from the river a villa rose against a background of rounded
+tree tops, with Lombardy poplars picking themselves out before it, but
+for the most part the tops of the banks, with which we stood even on
+our deck, retreated from the waterside willows in levels of meadow-land,
+where white and red cows were grazing, and now and then young horses
+romping away from groups of their elders. It was all dear and kind and
+sweet, with a sort of mid-Western look in its softness (as the English
+landscape often has), and the mud-banks were like those of my native
+Ohio Valley rivers. The effect was heightened, on our return, by an
+aged and virtuously poor (to all appearance) flageolet and cornet band,
+playing _'Way down upon the Suwanee River_, while the light played in
+"ditties no-tone" over the groves and pastures of the shore, and the
+shadows stretched themselves luxuriously out as if for a long night's
+sleep. There has seldom been such a day since I began to grow old; a
+soft September gale ruffled and tossed the trees finely, and a subtle
+Italian quality mixed with the American richness of the sunshiny air; so
+that I thought we reached Bishopsthorpe only too soon, and I woke from a
+pleasant reverie to be told that the steamer could not land with us, but
+we must be taken ashore in the small boat which we saw putting out for
+us from its moorings. To this day I do not know why the steamer could
+not land, but perhaps the small boat had a prescriptive right in the
+matter. At any rate, it was vigorously manned by a woman, who took
+tuppence from each of us for her service, and presently earned it by the
+interest she showed in our getting to the Archbishop's palace, or villa,
+the right way.
+
+[Illustration: YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER]
+
+So we went round by an alluring road to its forking, where, looking up
+to the left, we could see a pretty village behind Lombardy poplars,
+and coming down toward us in a victoria for their afternoon drive,
+two charmingly dressed ladies, with bright parasols, and looking very
+county-family, as we poor Americans imagine such things out of English
+fiction. We entered the archiepiscopal grounds through a sympathetic
+Gothic screen, as I will call the overture to the Gothic edifice in my
+defect of architectural terminology, though perhaps gateway would be
+simpler; and found ourselves in the garden, and in the company of
+those people we had towed down behind our steamer. They were with
+their friend, the gardener, and, claiming their acquaintance as
+fellow-passengers, we made favor with him to see the house. The
+housekeeper, or some understudy of hers, who received us, said the
+family were away, but she let us follow her through. That is more than
+I will let the reader do, for I know the duty of the cultivated American
+to the intimacies of the gentle English life; it is only with the simple
+life that I ever make free; there, I own, I have no scruple. But I will
+say (with my back turned conscientiously to the interior) that nothing
+could be lovelier than the outlook from the dining-room, and the whole
+waterfront of the house, on the wavy and willowy Ouse, and that I would
+willingly be many times an archbishop to have that prospect at all my
+meals.
+
+
+IV
+
+We despatched our visit so promptly that we got back to our boat-woman's
+cottage a full hour before our steamer was to call for us. She had an
+afternoon fire kindled in her bright range, from the oven of which came
+already the odor of agreeable baking. Upon this hint we acted, and
+asked if tea were possible. It was, and jam sandwiches as well, or if
+we preferred buttered tea-cake, with or without currants, to jam
+sandwiches, there would be that presently. We preferred both, and we sat
+down in that pleasant parlor-kitchen, and listened, till the tea-cake
+came out of the oven and was split open and buttered smoking hot, to
+a flow of delightful and instructive talk. For our refection we paid
+sixpence each, but for our edification we are still, and hope ever to
+be, in debt. Our hostess was of a most cheerful philosophy, such as
+could not be bought of most modern philosophers for money. The flour for
+our tea-cakes, she said, was a shilling fivepence a stone, "And not too
+much for growing and grinding it, and all." Every week-day morning she
+rose at half-past four, and got breakfast for her boys, who then rode
+their bicycles, or, in the snow, walked, all the miles of our voyage
+into York, where they worked in the railway shops. No, they did not
+belong to any union; the railway men did not seem to care for it; only a
+"benefit union."
+
+She kept the house for her family, and herself ready to answer every
+hail from the steamer; but in her mellow English content, which was not
+stupid or sodden, but clever and wise, it was as if it were she, rather
+than the archbishop, whose nature expressed itself in a motto on one
+of the palace walls, "Blessed be the Lord who loadeth us with blessings
+every day."
+
+When the range, warming to its work, had made her kitchen-parlor a
+little too hot to hold us, she hospitably suggested the river shore as
+cooler, where she knew a comfortable log we could sit on. Thither she
+presently followed when the steamer's whistle sounded, and held her
+boat for us to get safely in. The most nervous of our party offered
+the reflection, as she sculled us out into the stream to overhaul the
+pausing steamer, that she must find the ferry business very shattering
+to the nerves, and she said,
+
+"Yes, but it's nothing to a murder case I was on, once."
+
+"Oh, what murder, what murder?" we palpitated back; and both of us
+forgot the steamer, so that it almost ran us down, while our ferrywoman
+began again:
+
+"A man shot a nurse--There! Throw that line, will you?"
+
+But he, who ought to have thrown the line for her, in his distraction
+let her drop her oar and throw the line herself, and then we scrambled
+aboard without hearing any more of the murder.
+
+This is the climax I have been working up to, and I call it a fine one;
+as good as a story to be continued ever ended an instalment with.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
+
+
+The Doncaster Races lured us from our hotel at York, on the first day,
+as I had dimly foreboded they would. In fact, if there had been no lure,
+I might have gone in search of temptation, for in a world where sins are
+apt to be ugly, a horse-race is so beautiful that if one loves beauty
+he can practise an aesthetic virtue by sinning in that sort. So I
+made myself a pretence of profit as well as pleasure, and in going to
+Doncaster I feigned the wish chiefly to compare its high event with that
+of Saratoga. I had no association with the place save horse-racing, and
+having missed Ascot and Derby Day, I took my final chance in pursuit
+of knowledge--I said to myself, "Not mere amusement"--and set out for
+Doncaster unburdened by the lightest fact concerning the place.
+
+
+I
+
+I learned nothing of it when there, but I have since learned, from
+divers trustworthy sources, that Doncaster is the Danum of Antoninus and
+the Dona Ceaster of the Saxons, and that it is not only on the line of
+the Northeastern Railway, but also on that famous Watling Street which
+from the earliest Saxon time has crossed the British continent from sea
+to sea, and seems to impress most of the cities north and south into a
+conformity with its line, like a map of the straightest American railway
+routes.
+
+Unless my ignorance has been abused, nothing remarkable has happened
+at Doncaster in two thousand years, but this is itself a distinction in
+that eventful England where so many things have happened elsewhere.
+It is the market town of a rich farming region, and has notable
+manufactures of iron and brass, of sacking and linen, of spun flax and
+of agricultural machines and implements. Otherwise, it is important only
+for its races, which began there three hundred years ago, and especially
+for its St. Leger Day, of which Lieutenant-General St. Leger became the
+patron saint in 1778, though he really established his Day two years
+earlier.
+
+Doncaster is a mighty pleasant, friendly, rather modern, and
+commonplacely American-looking town, with two-story trams gently ambling
+up and down its chief avenues, in the leisurely English fashion, and
+all of more or less arrival and departure at the race-grounds. In our
+company the reader will have our appetites for lunch, and if he will
+take his chance with us in the first simple place away from the station,
+he will help us satisfy them very wholesomely and agreeably at boards
+which seem festively set up for the occasion, and spread with hot
+roast-beef and the plain vegetables which accompany the national dish
+in its native land; or he can have the beef cold, or have cold lamb or
+chicken cold. His fellow-lunchers will be, as he may like well enough
+to fancy, of somewhat lower degree than himself, but they will all seem
+very respectable, and when they come out together, they will all be
+equalized in the sudden excitement which has possessed itself of the
+street, and lined the curbstones up and down with spectators, their
+bodies bent forward, and their faces turned in the direction of the
+station.
+
+
+II
+
+The excitement is caused by the coming of the King; and I wish that I
+could present that event in just its sincere unimpressiveness. I have
+assisted at several such events on the Continent, where, especially in
+Germany, they are heralded as they are in the theatre, with a blare of
+trumpets, and a sensation in the populace and the attendant military
+little short of an ague fit. There, as soon as the majesties mount into
+their carriages from the station, they drive off as swiftly as their
+horses can trot, and their subjects, who have been waiting for hours to
+see them, make what they can of a meagre half-minute's glimpse of
+them. But how different was the behavior of that easy-going Majesty of
+England! As soon as I heard that he was coming, I perceived how anxious
+I had been in the half-year of my English sojourn to see him, and how
+bitterly I should have been disappointed to leave his realms without it.
+All kings are bad, I knew that well enough; but I also knew that some
+kings are not so bad as others, and I had been willing to accept at
+their face the golden opinions of this King, which, almost without
+exception, his lieges seemed to hold. Of course it is not hard to think
+well of a king if you are under him, just as it is not hard to think
+ill of him if you are not under him; but there is no use being bigotedly
+republican when there is nothing to be got by it, and I own the fact
+that his subjects like him willingly. Probably no man in his kingdom
+understands better than Edward VII. that he is largely a form, and that
+the more a form he is the more conformable he is to the English ideal
+of a monarch. But no Englishman apparently knows better than he when to
+leave off being a form and become a man, and he has endeared himself to
+his people from time to time by such inspirations. He is reputed on all
+hands to be a man of great good sense; if he is ever fooled it is not by
+himself, but by the system which he is no more a part of than the least
+of his subjects. If he will let a weary old man or a delicate woman
+stand indefinitely before him, he is no more to blame for that than for
+speaking English with a trace of German in his _th_ sounds; he did not
+invent his origins or his traditions. Personally, having had it out with
+life, he is as amiable and as unceremonious as a king may be. He shares,
+as far as he can, the great and little interests of his people. He has
+not, so far as noted, the gifts of some of his sisters, but he has much
+of his mother's steadfast wisdom, and his father's instinct for the
+right side in considerable questions; and he has his father's prescience
+of the psychological moment for not bothering. Of course, he is a
+fetish; no Englishman can deny that the kingship is an idolatry; but
+he is a fetish with an uncommon share of the common man's divinity.
+The system which provides him for the people provides them the best
+administration in the world, always naturally in the hands of their
+superiors, social and political; but we could be several times rottener
+than we administratively are, and still be incalculably reasonabler, as
+republicans, than those well-governed monarchists.
+
+[Illustration: DURHAM CATHEDRAL--NORTHWEST VIEW]
+
+Some of us are apt to forget the immense advantage which we have of the
+monarchical peoples in having cast away the very name of King, for with
+the name goes the nature of royalty and all that is under and around it.
+But because we are largely a fond and silly folk, with a false conceit
+of ourselves and others, we like to make up romances about the favor in
+which thrones, municipalities, and powers hold us. Once it was the Tsar
+of Russia who held us dear, and would do almost anything for Americans;
+now it is the King of England who is supposed rather to prefer us to his
+own people, and to delight to honor us. We attribute to him a feeling
+which a little thought would teach, us was wholly our own, and which
+would be out of nature if not out of reason with him. He is a man of
+sense, and not of sentiment, and except as a wise politician he could
+have no affection for a nation whose existence denies him. He is very
+civil to Americans; it is part of a constitutional king's business to be
+civil to every one; but he is probably not sentimental about us; and we
+need not be sentimental about him.
+
+He looked like a man of sense, and not like a man of sentiment, that
+day as he drove through the Doncaster street on his way to the sport he
+loves beyond any other sport. He sat with three other gentlemen on the
+sidewise seats of the trap, preceded by outriders, which formed the
+simple turnout of the greatest prince in the world. He was at the end on
+the right, and he showed fully as stout as he was, in the gray suit he
+wore, while he lifted his gray top-hat now and then, bowing casually,
+almost absently, to the spectators fringing, not too deeply, the
+sidewalks. He was very, very stout, even after many seasons of
+Marienbad, and after the sufferings he had lately undergone, and he
+was quite like the pictures and effigies of him, down to those on the
+postage-stamps. He has a handsome face, still bearded in the midst of a
+mostly clean-shaving nation, and with the white hairs prevalent on
+the cheeks and temples; his head is bald atop, though hardly from the
+uneasiness of wearing a crown.
+
+It was difficult to realize him for what he was, and in the unmilitary
+keeping of a few policemen, he was not of the high histrionic presence
+that those German majesties were. The good-natured crowd did not strain
+itself in cheering, though it seemed to cheer cordially; and it did
+not stay long after the trap tooled comfortably away. I then addressed
+myself to a little knot of railway servants who lingered talking, and
+asked them what some carriages were still waiting for at the door of the
+station, and one of them answered with a lightness you do not expect
+in England, "Oh, Lord This, and Lady That, and the Hon. Mr.
+I-don't-know-what's-his-name." The others laughed at this ribald satire
+of the upper classes, and I thought it safer to follow the King to the
+races lest I should hear worse things of them.
+
+
+III
+
+The races were some miles away, and when we got to the tracks we did
+not find their keeping very different from that of the Saratoga tracks,
+although the crowd was both smarter and shabbier, and it had got to the
+place through a town of tents and sheds, and a population of hucksters
+and peddlers, giving an effect of permanency to the festivity such as
+a solemnity of ours seldom has. When we bought our tickets we found, in
+the familiarity with the event expected of us, that there was no one to
+show us to our places; but by dint of asking we got to the Grand Stand,
+and mounted to our seats, which, when we stood up from them, commanded a
+wholly satisfactory prospect of the whole field.
+
+I do not know the dimensions of the Doncaster track, or how far they
+exceed those of the Saratoga track. Possibly one does not do its extent
+justice because there is no track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a
+green turf, with a certain course railed off on it. I hope the reader
+will be as much surprised as I was to realize that the sport of
+horse-racing in England gets its name of Turf from the fact that the
+races are run on the grass, and not on the bare ground, as with us. We
+call the sport the Turf, too, but that is because in this, as in so many
+other things, we lack incentive and invention, and are fondly colonial
+and imitative; we ought to call it the Dirt, for that is what it is with
+us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the definition in England which
+our course gives, and when it began, I missed the relief into which our
+track throws the bird-like sweep of the horses as they skim the naked
+earth in the distance.
+
+I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances
+the thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so
+scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the
+shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so
+much gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The
+crowd thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see,
+and bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with
+the shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the
+book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here.
+With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins;
+but I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at
+the Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the
+horse next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty close.
+By the end of the third or how far they exceed those of the Saratoga
+track. Possibly one does not do its extent justice because there is no
+track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a green turf, with a certain
+course railed off on it. I hope the reader will be as much surprised as
+I was to realize that the sport of horse-racing in England gets its name
+of Turf from the fact that the races are run on the grass, and not on
+the bare ground, as with us. We call the sport the Turf, too, but that
+is because in this, as in so many other things, we lack incentive and
+invention, and are fondly colonial and imitative; we ought to call it
+the Dirt, for that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the racing
+lacks the definition in England which our course gives, and when it
+began, I missed the relief into which our track throws the bird-like
+sweep of the horses as they skim the naked earth in the distance.
+
+I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances
+the thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so
+scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the
+shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so
+much gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The
+crowd thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see,
+and bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with
+the shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the
+book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here.
+With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins;
+but I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at
+the Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the
+horse next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty
+close. By the end of the third race he had softened into something like
+confidence toward me; certainly into conversability; such was the effect
+of my being a dead-game sport, or looking it. But how account for the
+trustfulness of the young woman on my other hand who wore her gold watch
+outside her dress, and who turned to the elderly stranger for sympathy
+in a certain supreme moment? This was when the crowd below crumpled
+suddenly together like the crushing of paper and the sense of something
+tragically mysterious in the distance clarified itself as the death of
+one of the horses. It had dropped from heart-break in its tracks, as if
+shot, and presently a string of young men and boys came dragging to some
+_spoliarium_ the long, slender body of the pretty creature over the turf
+which its hoofs had beaten a moment before. Then it was that the girl,
+with the watch on her breast, turned and asked, "Isn't it sad?"
+
+[Illustration: FINCHALE PRIORY]
+
+
+IV
+
+She was probably not the daughter of a hundred earls, but there must
+have been some such far-descended fair among the ladies who showed
+themselves from time to time in the royal paddock across a little space
+from our Grand Stand. The enclosure has no doubt a more technical
+name, which I would call it by if I knew it, for I do not wish to be
+irreverent; but paddock is very sporty, and it must serve my occasion.
+The King never showed himself there at all, though much craned round for
+and eagerly expected. But ladies and gentlemen moved about in the close,
+and stood and talked together; very tall people, very easily straight
+and well set up, very handsome, and very amiable-looking; they may have
+been really kind and good, or they may have looked so to please the
+King and keep his spirits up. I did not then, but I do now, realize that
+these were courtiers, such as one has always read of, and were of very
+historical quality in their attendance on the monarch. I trust it will
+not take from the dignity of the fact if I note that several of the
+courtiers wore derby hats, and one was in a sack coat and a topper. I
+am not sure what the fairer reader will think if I tell that one of the
+ladies had on a dress with a white body and crimson skirt and sleeves,
+and a vast black picture-hat, and wore it with a charming air of
+authority.
+
+The weather, in the excitement of the races, had not known whether it
+was raining or not, but we feared its absent-mindedness, and at the end
+of the third race we went away. It is not well to trust an English day
+too far; this had begun with brilliant sunshine, but it dimmed as it
+wore on, and we could not know that it was keeping for us the surprise
+of a very refined sunset. My memory does not serve as to just how we had
+got out to the race-ground; I think, from our being set down at the very
+gate, that it was by hansom or by fly; but now we promised ourselves to
+walk back to town. We did not actually do so; we went back most of the
+way by tram; but we were the firmer about walking at the outset, because
+we presently found ourselves in a lane of gypsy tents, where there was
+an alluring sight and smell of frying fish and potatoes. In the midst of
+the refection, you could have your fortune told, very favorably, for a
+very little money. All up and down this happy avenue there went girls of
+several dozen sizes and ages, crying a particular kind of taffy, proper
+to the day and place, and never to be had on any other day in any other
+place.
+
+We had an hour before train-time, and we thought we would go and see
+the Parish Church of Doncaster, which we had read was worth seeing.
+Our belief was confirmed by a group of disappointed ladies in the
+churchyard, who said it was a most beautiful church inside, but that
+they had not seen it because it was shut. We proved the fact by trying
+the door, and then we came away consoling ourselves with the scoff that
+it was probably closed for the races. At the bookseller's, where we
+stopped to buy some photographs of the interior of the church we had not
+seen, we lamented our disappointment, and the salesman said, "Perhaps
+it was closed for the races." So our joke seemed to turn earnest, and on
+reflection it did not surprise us in that England of close-knit unities
+where people and prince are of one texture in their pleasures and
+devotions, and the Church is hardly more national than the Turf.
+
+
+V
+
+At Durham, which was my next excursion from York, I cannot claim,
+therefore, that my mission was more serious because it almost solely
+concerned the Church, or that it was more frivolous at Doncaster, where
+it almost solely concerned the Turf. My train started in a fine mist
+that turned to sun, but not before it had shown me with the local color,
+which a gray light lends everything, a pack of hounds crossing a field
+near the track with two huntsmen at their heels. They were not chasing,
+but running leisurely, and with their flower-like, loose spread over the
+green, and the pink-coated hunters on their brown mounts, they afforded
+a picture as vivid and of as perfect semblance to all my visions of
+fox-hunting as I could have asked. I had been hoping that I might see
+something of the famous sport, almost as English as the Church or the
+Turf, and there, suddenly and all unexpectedly, the sight fully and
+satisfyingly was. Now, indeed, I felt that my impression of English
+society was complete, and that I might go home and write novels of
+English high life, and do something to redeem myself a little from the
+disgrace I had fallen into with my fellow-plebeians by always writing
+of common Americans, like themselves, and never _grandes dames_ or ideal
+persons, or people in the best society.
+
+But I did not want to go home at once, or turn back from going to Durham
+through that pleasant landscape, where the mist hung between the trees
+which seemed themselves only heavier bulks of mist. The wheat in some
+of the fields was still uncut, and in others, where it had been gathered
+into sheaves, the rooks by hundreds were noisily gleaning in the track
+of the reapers. From this conventionally English keeping, I passed
+suddenly to the sight of the gaunt, dry, gravelly bed of a wide river,
+such as I had known in Central Italy, or the Middle West at home; and I
+realized once again that England is no island of one simple complexion,
+but is a condensed continent, with all continental varieties of feature
+in it. You must cover thousands and thousands of miles in our tedious
+lengths and breadths for the beauties and sublimities of scenery which
+you shall gather from fewer hundreds in England; I have no doubt they
+have even volcanoes there, but I did not see any, probably because the
+English are so reticent, and hate to make a display of any sort.
+
+
+VI
+
+It is because they are so, or possibly because of my ignorance, that I
+did not know or at all imagine how magnificent the Cathedral of Durham
+is, or what a matchless seat it has on the bluffs of the river, with
+depths of woods below its front, tossing in the rich chill of the
+September wind. As it takes flight for the heavens, to which its
+business is to invite the thought, it seems to carry the earth with it,
+for if you climb those noble heights, you find your feet still on the
+ground, in a most stately space of open level between the cathedral and
+its neighbor castle, which alone could be worthy of its high company.
+
+The castle is Tudor, but the cathedral is beyond all other English
+cathedrals, I believe, Norman, though to the naked eye it looks so
+Gothic, and probably is. Here I will leave the reader with any pictures
+or memories of it which he happens to have, for I have always held it
+a sin to try describing architecture, or if not a sin, a bore. What
+chiefly remains to me of my impression of Durham Cathedral is,
+strangely enough, an objection: I did not like those decorated pillars,
+alternating with the clustered columns of the interior, and I do not
+suppose I ever shall: the spiral furrows, the zigzag and lozenge figures
+chiselled in their surfaces, weakened them to the eye and seemed to
+trifle with their proud bulk.
+
+But to the castle of Durham I have no objection whatever. I should like
+to live in it, as I should in all other Tudor houses, great or small,
+that I saw, where, as I am constantly saying, a high ideal of comfort
+is realized. It is almost as nobly placed as the cathedral, and it is
+approached by a very stately courtyard, of like spacious effect with the
+cathedral piazza. Inside it there is a kitchen of the sixteenth century,
+with a company of neat serving-maids, too comely and young to be,
+perhaps, of the same period, that gives the tourist a high sense of the
+luxury in which the Bishop of Durham and the Judges of the Assize Courts
+live when they are residents in the castle. One sees their apartments,
+dim and rich, and darkly furnished, but not gloomily, both where they
+sleep and where they eat, and flatteringly envies them in a willingness
+for the moment to be a judge or a bishop for the sake of such a fit
+setting. There is also a fine crypt, with a fine dining-hall and a black
+staircase of ancient oak, and a gallery with classic busts, and other
+pictures worthy of wonder, let alone a history from the time of William
+the Conqueror, who first fancied a castle where it stands, down to the
+present day. The memory of such successive guests as the Empress Matilda
+and Henry II. her son, King John, Henry III., Edwards I., II., and III.,
+Queen Philippa, Henry VI., and James I., and Charles I., and Edward
+VII., abides in the guidebook, and may be summoned from its page to
+the chambers of the beautiful old place by any traveller intending
+impressions for literary use from a medieval environment in perfect
+repair.
+
+
+VII
+
+One must be hard to satisfy if one is not satisfied with Durham Castle,
+and its interior contented me as fully as the exterior of the Cathedral.
+I went a walk, after leaving the castle, for a further feast of the
+Cathedral from the paths along the shelving banks of the beautiful
+Weare. There, at a certain point, I met a studious-looking gentleman who
+I am sure must have been a professor of Durham University hard by; and
+I asked him, with due entreaty for pardon, "What river was that." He
+quelled the surprise he must have felt at my ignorance and answered
+gently, "The Weare." "Ah, to be sure! The Weare," I said, and thanked
+him, and longed for more talk with him, but felt myself so unworthy that
+I had not the face to prompt him further. He passed, and then I met a
+man much more of my own kind, if not probably so little informed. That
+rich, chill gale was still tossing and buffeting the tree tops, and he
+made occasion of this to say, "This is a cold wynd a-blowin', Mister."
+"It is, rather," I assented. "I was think-in'," he observed from an
+apparent generalization, "that I wished I was at home." Then he suddenly
+added, "Help a poor man!" I was not wholly surprised at the climax,
+and I offered him, provisionally, a penny. "Will that do?" He hesitated
+perceptibly; then he allowed, with a subtle reluctance, "Yes, that'll
+do," and so passed on to satisfy, I hope, the wish he thought he had.
+
+[Illustration: DURHAM CATHEDRAL--ITS MATCHLESS SEAT ON THE BLUFFS OF THE
+RIVER]
+
+I pursued my own course, as far as the bridge which spans the Weare near
+a most picturesque mill, and then I stopped a kindly-looking workman
+and asked him whether he thought I could find a fly or cab anywhere near
+that would take me into the town. He answered, briefly but consistently
+with his looks, "Ah doot," and as he owned that it was a long way to
+town, I let his doubt decide me to go back to the station.
+
+I felt that I ought to have driven from there into the town, and seen
+it, and taken to York a later train than the one I had in mind. In the
+depravity induced by my neglect of this plain duty, I went, with my
+third class return ticket conscious in my pocket, into the first class
+refreshment room, and had tea there, as if I had been gentry at the very
+least, and possibly nobility. Then, having a good deal of time still
+on my hands, I loitered over the book-stall of the station, and stole a
+passage of conversation with a kindly clergyman whom I found looking at
+the pretty shilling editions filling the cases. I said, How nice it was
+to have Hazlitt in that green cloth; and he said, Yes, but he held for
+Gibbon in leather; and just then his train came in and he ran off to
+it, and left me to my guilt in not having gone to see Durham. It was now
+twilight, and too late; but there the charming old town still is, and
+will long remain, I hope, with its many memories of war and peace, for
+whoever will visit it. Certainly there had been no lack of adventures in
+my ample hour. It was as charming to weave my conjectures, about the
+two gentlemen with whom I had so barely spoken, as to have carried
+my acquaintance with them further, and I cannot see how it would have
+profited me to know more even of that fellow-man who, in the cold wynd
+a-blowing, had just been thinking he wished he was at home.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS
+
+
+It was fit that on our way to Boston we should pause in passing through
+Cambridge. That was quite as we should have done at home, and I can only
+wish now that we had paused longer, though every moment that kept us
+from Boston, if it had been anywhere but in England, would have been a
+loss. There, it was all gain, and all joy, the gay September 24th
+that we went this divine journey. My companion was that companionable
+archaeologist who had guided my steps in search of the American origins
+in London, and who was now to help me follow the Pilgrim Fathers over
+the ground where they sojourned when they were only the Pilgrim Sons.
+At divers places on the way, after we left London, he pointed out some
+scene associated with American saints or heroes. We traversed the region
+that George William Curtis' people came from, hard by Roxburgh, and
+Eliot's, the Apostle to the Indians; again we skirted the Ralph Waldo
+Emerson country, with its big market town of Bishop's Stortford; and
+beyond Ely, where we stopped for the Cathedral and a luncheon, not
+unworthy of it, at the station, he startled me from a pleasant drowse I
+had fallen into in our railway carriage, with the cry: "There! That is
+where Captain John Smith was born." "Where? Where?" I implored too late,
+looking round the compartment everywhere. "Back where those chickens
+were."
+
+
+I
+
+That was the nearest I came to seeing one of the most famous Virginian
+origins. But you cannot see everything in England; there are too many
+things; and if the truth must be known I cared more for the natural
+features than the historical facts of the landscape. The country was
+flat, and a raw green, as it should be in that raw air, under that
+dun sky, with sheep hardily biting the short tough pasturage under the
+imbrowning oaks and elms, and the olive-graying willows, beside the
+full, still streams scarce wetter than the ground they dreamed through.
+
+We did not reach Boston until six o'clock, when the day was already
+waning, and the Stump of St. Botolph's Church stood dim against the sky.
+It was a long drive through the suburban streets from the station to the
+hotel, which we found full, and which with its crazy floors touched the
+fancy as full of something besides guests. But it was well for us so,
+because across the market-place, which forms the chief public square
+of Boston, was a far better hotel, where we were welcomed to the
+old-fashioned ideal of the English inn, such as I did not so nearly
+realize anywhere else. The ideal was a little impaired by the electric
+light in our bedrooms, but it was not a very brilliant electric light,
+and there was a damp cold in the corridors which allowed no doubt of its
+genuineness. In the dining-room, which was also the reading-room, there
+was an admirable image of a fire in the grate, and a prevailing warmth
+and brightness which cheered the heart of exile. When we presently had
+dinner, specialized for us by certain differences from that of two other
+travellers, there seemed nothing more to ask, except the conversation of
+our companions, and this we duly had, quite as if we were four wayfarers
+met there in a book. One of these gentlemen proved a solicitor from
+Bath, and that made me feel more at home, knowing and loving Bath as I
+did. It did not matter that in trying for some mutual acquaintance
+there we failed; our good-will was everything; and the solicitor was
+intelligent and agreeable. The other gentleman, tall, dark, of urbane
+stateliness, was something more, in the touch of Oriental suavity
+which, more than his nose, betrayed him; and it appeared, in delightful
+suggestion of the old-time commercial intimacy of the Dutch and English
+coasts, that he was from Holland, and next morning at breakfast he
+developed a large valise, which I now think held samples. If he was a
+Dutch Jew, he was probably a Spanish Jew by descent, and what will the
+difficult reader have more, in the materials for his romance? Did we
+gather about the grate after we had done dinner, and each tell the
+story of his life, or at least the most remarkable thing that had ever
+happened to him?
+
+[Illustration: THE "STUMP" OF ST. BOTOLPH'S CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY]
+
+I cannot say, but I remember that my friend and I, in my instant hunger
+for Boston, which was greater than my hunger for dinner, set forth while
+the meal was preparing, and visited the Church of St. Botolph. To reach
+it we had to pass through the greater length of the market-place, one
+of the most picturesque in England, and the worthy ancestress of
+Faneuil Hall and Quincy market-places, which are the most picturesque in
+America. At one side of its triangle is the birthplace and dwelling
+of Jean Ingelow, and at the point nearest the church is the statue of
+Herbert Ingram, the less famous but more locally recognized Bostonian,
+who founded the _Illustrated London News_ with the money he made by the
+invention and sale of Old Parr's Pills. He was thrice sent to Parliament
+from his native town, and he related it to America, after two centuries,
+by drowning in Lake Michigan. "R. N.," the otherwise anonymous author of
+a very intelligent and agreeable _Handbook of Boston_, relates that in
+his first canvass for Parliament Ingram was opposed by a gentleman who,
+when he asked the voices of the voters, after the old English fashion,
+was told by four of them in succession that they were promised "to their
+cousin Ingram," and who thereupon declared that if he had known Ingram
+"was cousin to the whole town" he would, never have stood against him.
+Like the Bostonians of Massachusetts, the Bostonians of Lincolnshire
+were in fact closely knit together by ties of kinship, owing, "R. N."
+believes, to the isolation of Boston before the draining of its fens,
+and not to their conviction that there were no outsiders worthy to mate
+with them.
+
+
+II
+
+The house where the martyrologist John Fox first saw the light was
+replaced long ago by a famous old inn, pulled down in its turn; but the
+many and many Americans who visit Boston may still visit the house where
+Jean Ingelow was born. Whether they may see more than the outside of it
+I do not know from experiment or even inquiry. "R. N." will say nothing
+of her but that she was born, and that her father was a banker; perhaps
+he thinks that she has spoken sufficiently for herself.
+
+[Illustration: THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND QUINCY
+MARKET-PLACES]
+
+The air of the market-place, as we crossed to the church, was of a
+pleasant bleakness, and the Witham was coldly washing under the wall
+which keeps St. Botolph from it. In the dimness we could have only a
+conjecture of the church's outward beauty, and of the grandeur of the
+tower climbing into the evening, where it has hailed so many myriads
+of moving ships, and beckoned them to safety. But within, where it was
+already night, the church was cheerfully luminous with Welsbach lights,
+which showed it all wreathed and garlanded for a harvest festival,
+began the day before, and to be concluded now with some fit religious
+observance. The blossoms and leaves were a little wilted and withered,
+but the fruits and vegetables were there in sturdy endurance, and
+together they swathed the pulpit from which John Cotton used to preach,
+and all but hid its structure from view, like flowers of rhetoric
+softening some hard doctrine.
+
+Apparently, however, Cotton's doctrine was not anywise too hard, or
+even hard enough, for such "a factious people, who were imbued with the
+Puritan spirit," as he found in Boston, when he was first elected vicar
+of St. Botolph's; and it was not till Archbishop Laud's ecclesiastical
+tyrannies began that he came to see "the Sin of Conformity" and to
+preach resistance. His conflict with the authorities went so far that
+exile to another Boston in another hemisphere became his only hope.
+Or, as Lord Dorset intimated, "if he had been guilty of drunkenness,
+uncleanness, or any lesser fault, he could have obtained his pardon,
+but as he was guilty of Puritanism, and Non-conformity, the crime was
+non-pardonable; and therefore he advised him to flee for his safety."
+
+The Cotton Chapel, so called, was restored mainly with moneys received
+from Cotton's posterity, lineal or lateral, in his city of refuge
+overseas, and "the corbels that support the timbered ceiling are carved
+with the arms of certain of the early colonists of New England." Edward
+Everett, one of Cotton's descendants, wrote the dedicatory inscription
+in Latin, which "R. N." has Englished in verse, and I am the more
+scrupulous to quote it, because, as I must own with my usual reluctant
+honesty, I quite missed seeing the Cotton Chapel.
+
+     That here John Cotton's memory may survive
+     Where for so long he labored when alive,
+     In James' reign and Charles', ere it ceased--
+     A grave, skilled, learned, earnest parish-priest;
+     Till from the strife that tossed the Church of God
+     He in a new world sought a new abode,
+     To a new England, a new Boston came,
+     (That took, to honor him, that reverend name)
+     Fed the first flock of Christ that gathered there--
+     Till death deprived it of its shepherd's care--
+     There well resolved all doubts of mind perplext,
+     Whether with cares of this world or the next;
+     Two centuries five lustra from the year
+     That saw the exile leave his labors here,
+     His family, his townsmen, with delight--
+     (Whom to the task their English kin invite)--
+     To the fair fane he served so well of yore,
+     His name, in two worlds honored, thus restore,
+     This chapel renovate, this tablet place,
+     In this, the year of man's recovered Grace,
+                         1855.
+
+
+III
+
+I missed most of the other memorable things in the church that night,
+but I saw fleetingly some of the beautiful tombs for which it is famous;
+the effigies of the dead lay in their niches, quietly, as if already
+tucked away for the night, in the secular sleep of the dust beneath. The
+tombs were more famous than they, and more beautiful, if the faces of
+some were true likenesses, but after so many centuries one ought not to
+require even women to be pretty.
+
+[Illustration: THE RIVER AT EVENING]
+
+We had not begun to have enough of Boston yet, and after dinner we went
+a long walk up the Witham, away from the parapet before the church,
+under which its deep tides are always washing to and fro. In the
+dimness, after we had got a little to the outskirts of the town, there
+seemed shipyards along the river's course, but at one place there was
+a large building brilliantly lighted, which from certain effects at the
+windows we decided to be a printing-office on the scale of those in and
+near our own Boston. What was our shame and grief the next morning
+to find it was a cigar factory, and to learn that cigar and cigarette
+making was almost the chief industry of the mother Boston. There are
+really two large tobacco factories there running overtime, and always
+advertising for more women and girls to do their work; and in our
+Boston, not so long ago, smoking in the street was forbidden! Such are
+the ironies of life.
+
+What the shipyards had turned into by daylight, I do not now remember.
+The Witham had turned into a long, deep gash, cut down into the clay
+twenty feet from the level of the flood tides. We crossed on a penny
+ferry which the current pushed over in the manner of the earliest
+ferries, near the tobacco factory, and came back into the heart of the
+town through streets of low stone houses, with few buildings of note to
+dignify their course. Small craft lay along the steep muddy shores, and
+at one place a little excursion steamer was waiting for the tide to
+come in and float it for the fulfilment of its promise of sailing at ten
+o'clock. We idly longed to make its voyage with it, and if the chance
+were offering now, I certainly should not forego it as I did then. But
+when you are in a foreign place, no matter how much you have travelled
+and how well you know that it will not offer soon again, you reject the
+most smiling chance because you think you can take it any time.
+
+The morning was soft and warm, with a sun shining amiably on the rather
+commonplace old town. I had risen betimes that I might go and get
+a Spanish melon for my breakfast, but at eight o'clock I found the
+fruiterer's locked and barred against me. I lingered and hungered for
+the melons which I saw in his window, and then I tried other fruiterers,
+but none of them was stirring yet. I reflected how different it would
+have been in our own Boston; and if it had not been for the market
+people coming into the square and beginning to dress their stalls with
+vegetables, and fish, and native fruits, such as hard pears and knotty
+apples, I do not know how ill I might have come away thinking of that
+idle mother Boston. In other squares there were cattle for sale later,
+and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the
+markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place
+found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping
+with the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which,
+once for all, I must own was not an impressive place.
+
+The best thing in it, and the thing you are always coming back to,
+is the beautiful church, to which we paid a second visit early in the
+forenoon. We found it where we left it the night before, lifting its
+tower from the brink of the Witham, and looking far out over the flat
+land to a sea no flatter. The land seems indeed, like so much English
+coast, merely the sea come ashore, and turned into fens for the greater
+convenience of the fishermen, whom, with the deeper sea sailors, we
+saw about the town, lounging through the crooked streets, and hanging
+bare-armed upon the parapets of the bridges. Now we found the church
+had about its foot a population of Bostonians for whom, under their flat
+gravestones, it had been chiming the quarters from its mellow-throated
+bells, while the Bostonians on our side had been hustling for liberty,
+and money, and culture, and all the good things of this world, and
+getting them in a measure that would astonish their namesakes. Within
+the church we saw again the beautiful tombs of the night before, and
+others like them, and again we saw the pulpit of John Cotton, which we
+could make out a little better than at first, because its garlands were
+a little more withered and shrunken away. But better than either we
+realized the perfection of the church interior as a whole, so ample, so
+simple, such a comfortable and just sufficient eyeful.
+
+
+IV
+
+From other interests in St. Botolph's you somehow keep always, or
+finally, coming to the Stump, as the tower is called somewhat in the
+humor of our Boston. It is not so fair within as without; that could
+not be in the nature of things; and yet the interior of the tower has a
+claim upon the spectator's wonder, if not his admiration, which, so far
+as I know, the interior of no other tower has. It is all treated as a
+loftier room of the church, and its ceiling, a hundred and fifty feet
+from the ground, is elaborately and allegorically groined. The work was
+done when the whole church was restored about half a century ago, and
+has not the claim of medieval whim upon the fancy. Not so much pleasure
+as he might wish mingles with the marvel of the beholder, who carries a
+crick in the neck away from the sight, and yet once, but not more, in a
+way, it is worth while to have had the sight. Certainly this treatment
+of the tower is unique; there is nothing to compare with it in Boston,
+Massachusetts, and cannot be even when the interior of the Old South is
+groined.
+
+When we came out of the church, we found the weather amusing itself
+as usual in England, raining with wind, then blowing without rain, and
+presently, but by no means decisively, sunning without either wind or
+rain. The conditions were favorable to a further exploration of the
+town, which seemed to have a passion for old cannon, and for sticking
+them about in all sorts of odd nooks and corners. We found one smaller
+piece over a gateway, which we were forbidden by a sign-board to enter
+on pain of prosecution for trespassing. There was nothing else to
+prevent our entering, and we went in, to find ourselves in an alley with
+nothing but a Gypsy van in it. Nothing but a Gypsy van! As if that were
+not the potentiality of all manner of wild romance! Whether the alley
+belonged to Gypsies, or the Gypsies had trespassed by leaving their van
+in it, I shall now probably never know, but I commend the inquiry to any
+reader of mine whom these pages shall inspire to repeat our pilgrimage.
+
+[Illustration: LIFTING ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM]
+
+There was no great token of genteel life in Boston, so far as we saw it,
+but perhaps we did not look in the right places. There were good shops,
+but not fine or large ones, and I am able to report of the intellectual
+status that there are three weekly newspapers, but no dailies, which
+could not be the case in any American town of fourteen thousand people.
+Concerning society, I can only say that in our wanderings we came at one
+point on a vast, high-walled, iron-gated garden, which looked as if it
+might have society beyond it, but not being positively forbidden we did
+not penetrate it. We did indeed visit the ancient grammar-school, one
+of those foundations which in England were meant originally for the poor
+deserving of scholarship, but which have nearly all lapsed to the more
+deserving rich, careful of the contamination of the lower classes.
+Being out of term the school was closed to its pupils, but we found
+a contractor there removing the old stoves and putting in a system of
+hot-water heating, which he said was better fitted to resist the cold
+of the Boston winters. He was not a very conversable man, but so much we
+screwed out of him, with the added fact that the tuition of that school
+was no longer free. It came to some five guineas a year, no great sum,
+but perhaps sufficient to keep the school, with the other influences,
+select enough for the patronage to which it had fallen. It was a
+pleasant place, with a playground before it, which in the course of
+generations there must have been a good deal of schoolboy fun got out
+of.
+
+
+V
+
+There remained for us now only the Guildhall to visit, and we had left
+that to the last because it was the thing that had mostly brought us
+to Boston. It was the scene of the trial and imprisonment of those poor
+people of the region roundabout who were trying to escape from their
+"dread lord," James the First, and were arrested for this crime, and
+brought to answer for it before the magistrates of the town. Their dread
+lord had then lately met some ministers of their faith at Hampton Court,
+and there browbeaten, if not beaten, them in argument, so that he was in
+no humor to let, these people, who afterward became the Pilgrim Fathers,
+get away to Holland, where there was no dread lord, or at least none of
+King James' thinking.
+
+But no words can be so good to tell of all this as the words of Governor
+Bradford in his _Historie of Plymouth Plantation_, where he says that
+"ther was a large companie of them purposed to get passage at Boston in
+Lincolnshire, and for that end had hired a shipe wholy to them selves, &
+made agreement with the maister to be ready at a certaine day, and take
+them and their goods in, at a conveniente place, wher they accordingly
+would all attende in readiness. So after long waiting, & large expences,
+though he kepte not day with them, yet he came at length & tooke them
+in, in the night. But when he had them & their goods abord, he betrayed
+them, haveing before hand complotted with the serchers & other officers
+so to doe; who tooke them, and put them into open boats, & ther rifled
+and ransaked them, searching them to their shirts for money, yea even
+the women furder then became modestie; and then caried them back into
+the towne, & made them a spectakle & wonder to the multitude, which
+came flocking on all sides to behould them. Being thus first, by the
+catchpoule officer, rifled, & stripte of their money, books, and much
+other goods, they were presented to the magistrates, and messengers
+sente to informe the lords of the Counsell of them; and so they were
+comited to ward. Indeed the magistrats used them courteously, and shewed
+them what favour they could; but could not deliver them till order
+came from the Counsell-table. But the issue was that after a months
+imprisonmente, the greatest parte were dismiste, & sent to the places
+from whence they came; but 7. of the principall were still kept in
+prison, and bound over to the Assises."
+
+My excellent "R. N." of the _Handbook of Boston_ is anxious to have his
+reader, as I in turn am anxious to have mine, distinguish between these
+future Pilgrim Fathers and the gentlemen and scholars who later founded
+Boston in Massachusetts Bay, and called its name after that of the town
+they had dwelt in or often visited before they left the handsome keeping
+of the gentler life of Lincolnshire. Such were Richard Bellingham,
+Edmund Quincy, Thomas Leverett, John Cotton, Samuel Whiting, and
+others, known to our colonial and national history. Not even Bradford
+or Brewster, afterward dignified figures in Plymouth colony, were of the
+humble band, men, women, and children, that the officers of Boston took
+from their vessel. "Pathetic but splendid figures," my brave "R. N."
+calls them, and he tells how, after a month's jail, they were "sent home
+broken men, to endure the scoffs of their neighbors and the rigors of
+ecclesiastical discipline."
+
+
+VI
+
+The dungeons which remain to witness of their hardships in Boston are of
+thick-walled, iron-grated stone, and the captives were fed on bread
+and water within smell of the roasting and broiling of the Guildhall
+kitchens immediately beside them. I will not conjecture with "R. N."
+that they were put there "by a refinement of cruelty," so that they
+might suffer the more in that vicinage. "The magistrates" who had "used
+them courteously and shewed them what favour they could," would not have
+willed that; but perhaps "the Counsell-table" did; and it was certainly
+a hardship that the dungeons and the kitchens were so close together, as
+any man may see at this day. Neither the dungeons nor the kitchens are
+any longer used; the spits and grates are rusted where the fires blazed,
+and the cells where the Pilgrims suffered are now full of large earthen
+jars. For no other or better reason, the large open spaces of the
+basement outside of them were scattered about with agricultural
+implements, ploughs, harrows, and the like. It was the belief of my
+companion, founded on I know not what fact, that the hall in which the
+Pilgrims were tried was a large upper chamber which we found occupied by
+a boys' school. The door stood partly ajar, and we could see the master
+within walking up and down before some twenty boys, as if waiting for
+one of them to answer some question he had put them. Perhaps it was a
+question of local history, for none of them seemed able to answer it;
+presently when a boy came out on some errand, and we stopped him, and
+asked him where it was the Pilgrims had been tried, he did not know,
+and apparently he had never heard of the Pilgrims. He was a very
+nice-looking boy, and otherwise not unintelligent; certainly he was
+well-mannered, as nice-looking English boys are apt to be with their
+elders; perhaps he had heard too much of the Pilgrims, and had purposely
+forgotten them. This might very well have happened in a place like
+Boston where such hordes of Americans are coming every year, and asking
+so many hard questions concerning an incident of local history not
+wholly creditable to the place. He could justly have said that the same
+or worse might have happened to the Pilgrims anywhere else in England,
+under the dread lord there then was, and in fact something of the same
+hardship did befall them afterward at the place a little northeast of
+Boston, which we were now to visit for their piteous sake.
+
+"The nexte spring after," as Bradford continues the narrative of their
+sorrows, "ther was another attempte made by some of these & others, to
+get over at an other place. And so it fell out, that they light of a
+Dutchman at Hull, having a ship of his owne belonging to Zealand; they
+made agreements with him, and acquainted him with their condition,
+hoping to find more faithfullnes in him, then in the former of their
+owne nation. He bad them not fear, for he would doe well enough. He
+was by appointment to take them in betweene Grimsbe & Hull, where was
+a large comone a good way distante from any towne. Now against the
+prefixed time, the women & children, with the goods, were sent to the
+place in a small barke, which they had hired for that end; and the men
+were to meete them by land. But it so fell out, that they were ther a
+day before the shipe came, and the sea being rough, and the women very
+sicke, prevailed with the seamen to put into a creeke hardby, wher they
+lay on ground at lowwater. The nexte morning the shipe came, but they
+were fast, & could not stir till about noone. In the mean time, the
+shipe maister, perceiveing how the matter was, sente his boate to be
+getting the men abord whom he saw ready, walking aboute the shore. But
+after the first boat full was gott abord, & she was ready to goe for
+more, the Mr. espied a greate company, both horse & foote, with bills,
+& gunes, & other weapons; for the countrie was raised to take them. The
+Dutchman seeing this swore his countries oath, 'sacremente,' and having
+the wind faire, waiged his Ancor, hoysed sayles, & away. But the poore
+men which were gott abord, were in great distress for their wives and
+children, which they saw thus to be taken, and were left destitute of
+their helps; and them selves also, not having a cloath to shifte them
+with, more then they had on their baks, & some scarce a peney aboute
+them, all they had being abord the barke. It drew tears from their
+eyes, and any thing they had they would have given to have been a shore
+againe; but all in vaine, ther was no remedy, they must thus sadly part.
+The rest of the men there were in greatest danger, made shift to escape
+away before the troope could surprise them: those only staying that best
+might, to be assistante unto the women. But pitifull it was to see the
+heavie case of these poore women in this distress: what weeping & crying
+on every side, some for their husbands, that were carried away in the
+ship as is before related; others not knowing what should become of
+them, & their little ones; others again melted in teares, seeing their
+poore little ones hanging aboute them, crying for feare, and quaking
+with could. Being thus aprehanded, they hurried from one place to
+another, and from one justice to another, till in the ende they knew not
+what to doe with them; for to imprison so many women & innocent children
+for no other cause (many of them) but that they must goo with their
+husbands, seemed to be unreasonable and all would crie out of them;
+and to send them home againe was as difficult, for they aleged, as the
+trueth was, they had no homes to goe to, for they had either sould, or
+otherwise disposed of their houses & livings. To be shorte, after they
+had been thus turmoyled a good while, and conveyed from one constable to
+another, they were glad to be ridd of them in the end upon any termes:
+for all were wearied & tired with them. Though in the mean time they
+(poore soules) indured miserie enough; and thus in the end necessitie
+forste a way for them."
+
+
+VII
+
+If there is any more touching incident in the history of man's
+inhumanity to man, I do not know it, or cannot now recall it; and it was
+to visit the scene of it near "Grimsbe," or Great Grimsby, as it is now
+called, that we set out, after viewing their prison in Boston, over wide
+plains, with flights of windmills alighted on them everywhere. Here and
+there one seemed to have had its wings clipped, and we were told by a
+brighter young fellow than we often had for a travelling companion
+that this was because steam had been put into it as a motive power more
+constant than wind, even on that wind-swept coast. There seems to have
+been nothing else, so far as my note-book witnesses, to take up our
+thoughts in the short run to Great Grimsby, and for all I know now I
+may have drowsed by many chicken-yards marking the birthplace of our
+discoverers and founders. We got to Great Grimsby in time for a very
+lamentable lunch in a hostelry near the station, kept, I think, for such
+"poore people" as the Pilgrims were, with stomachs not easily turned by
+smeary marble table-tops with a smeary maid having to take their orders,
+and her ineffective napkin in her hand. The honesty as well as the
+poverty of the place was attested, when, returning to recover a
+forgotten umbrella, we were met at the door by this good girl, who had
+left her bar to fetch it in anticipation of all question.
+
+At Great Grimsby, it seemed, there was no vehicle but a very exceptional
+kind of cab,--looking like a herdic turned wrongside fore, and unable
+to orient itself aright,--available for the long drive to that "large
+comone a good way distante from any towne," which we were to make, if
+we wished to visit the scene of the Pilgrims' sufferings in their second
+attempt to escape from their dread lord. In this strange equipage,
+therefore, we set out, and nine long miles we drove through a country
+which seemed to rise with increasing surprise at us and our turnout on
+each inquiry we made for the way from chance passers. Just beyond the
+suburbs of the town we entered the region of a vast, evil smell which
+we verified as that of the decaying fish spread upon the fields, for
+a fertilizer after they had missed their market in that great fishing
+centre. Otherwise the landscape was much the ordinary English landscape
+of the flatter parts, but wilder and rougher than in the south or west,
+and constantly growing more so as we drove on and on. Our cabman kept
+a good courage, as long as the highway showed signs of much travel,
+but when it began to falter away into a country road, he must have
+lost faith in our sanity, though he kept an effect of the conventional
+respect for his nominal betters which English cabmen never part with
+except in a dispute about fares and distances. We stayed him as well
+as we could with some grapes and pears, which we found we did not
+want after our lunch, and which we handed him up through his little
+trap-door, but a plaintive quaver grew into his voice, and he let his
+horse lag in the misgiving which it probably shared with him. Nothing
+of signal interest occurred in our progress except at one point, near
+a Methodist chapel, where we caught sight of a gayly painted blue van,
+lettered over with many texts and mottoes, which my friend explained
+as one of the vans intinerantly used by extreme Protestants of the Anne
+Askew persuasion to prevent the spread of Romanism in England.
+
+The signs of travel had not only ceased, but a little in front of us the
+way was barred by a gate, and beyond this gate there was nothing but a
+sort of savage pasture, with many red and brown cattle in it, gathered
+questioningly about the barrier, or lifting their heads indifferently
+from the grass. Just before we reached the gate we passed a peasant's
+cottage, where he was sociably getting in his winter's coal, and he and
+his wife and children, and the carter, all leaned upon whatever supports
+they found next them, and stared at the extraordinary apparition of two,
+I hope, personable strangers driving in a hansom of extreme type into a
+cow pasture. But we were not going to give ourselves away to their too
+probable ignorance by asking if that were the place where the Pilgrims
+who founded New England were first stopped from going to Holland.
+
+My friend dismounted, and opened the gate, and we drove in among the
+cattle, and after they had satisfied a peaceful curiosity concerning us,
+they went about their business of eating grass, and we strayed over "the
+large comone," and tried to imagine its looks nearly three hundred years
+before. They could not have been very different; the place could hardly
+have been much wilder, and there was the "creeke hardby wher they lay,"
+the hapless women and children, in their boat "at lowwater," while the
+evening came on, no doubt, just as it was doing with us, the weather
+clearing, and the sunset glassy and cold. Off yonder, away across the
+solitary moor, was the course of the Humber, marked for us by the trail
+of a steamer's smoke through the fringes of trees, and for them by the
+sail of the Dutchman, who, when he saw next day that "great company,
+both horse and foote, with bills and gunes, and other weapons," coming
+to harry those poor people, "swore his countries oath, 'sacremente,'
+and having the wind faire, waiged his ancor, hoysed sails, and away,"
+leaving those desolate women and their little ones lamenting.
+
+
+VIII
+
+On our way back we stopped at a little country church, so peaceful, so
+very peaceful, in the evening light, where it stood, withdrawn from the
+highway, Norman and Gothic without, and within all so sweet and bare
+and clean, that we could not believe in the old ecclesiasticism
+which persecuted the Puritans into the exile whither they carried the
+persecuting spirit with them. A pretty child, a little girl, opened the
+churchyard gate and held it for us to pass, and her gentleness made me
+the more question the history of those dreadful days in the past. When I
+saw a young lady, in the modern dress which I had so often lost my heart
+to at the Church Parade in Hyde Park, going up a leafy lane, toward the
+vicarage, from having been for tennis and afternoon tea at some pleasant
+home in the neighborhood, I denied the atrocious facts altogether. She
+had such a very charming hat on.
+
+The suburbs of Great Grimsby, after you reach them through that zone of
+bad smell, are rather attractive, and you get into long clean streets of
+small stone houses, like those of Plymouth or Southampton, and presently
+you reach the Humber, which is full of the steamers and sail, both
+fishing and deep sea, of the prosperous port, with great booms of
+sawlogs from Norway, half filling the channel, and with a fringe of tall
+chimneys from the sawmills along the shores. Great Grimsby is not only
+the centre of a vast distributing trade in coal and lumber, but of a
+still vaster trade in fish. It cuts one's pride, if one has believed
+that Gloucester, Massachusetts, is the greatest fishing port in the
+world, to learn that Grimsby, with a hundred more fishing sail, is only
+"_one_ of the principal fishing ports" of the United Kingdom. What can
+one do against those brutal British statistics? We think our towns grow
+like weeds, but London seems to grow half such a weed as Chicago in a
+single night.
+
+[Illustration: FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY]
+
+After we were got well into the town, we found ourselves part of an
+immense bicycle parade, with bicyclers of both sexes on their wheels, in
+masks and costumes, Pierrots, and Clowns, and Harlequins and Columbines,
+in a competition for the prettiest and fanciest dress.
+
+When we came to start from the station on our run to London, we
+reflected that there were a great many of these bicyclers, and that they
+would probably crowd us in our third-class compartment. So, as we had
+bought an excellent supper in baskets, such as they send you on the
+trains everywhere in England, and wished to eat it in quiet, we sought
+out the guard who was lurking near for the purpose, and bribed him to
+shut us into that compartment, and not let any one else in. There
+we remained in darkness, with our curtains drawn, and when, near
+train-time, the bicyclers began to swarm about the carriages, we heard
+them demanding admittance to our compartment from our faithful guard,
+if that is the right way to call him. He turned them away with soft
+answers, answers so very soft that we could not make out what he said,
+but he seemed to be inviting them into other compartments, which he
+doubtless pretended were better. The murmurs would die away, and then
+rise again, and from time to time we knew that a baffled bicycler was
+pulling at our door, or vainly bumping against it. We listened with our
+hearts in our mouths; but no one got in, and the train started, and we
+opened our baskets and began to eat and to drink, like two aristocrats
+or plutocrats. What made our inhuman behavior worse was that we were
+really nothing of the kind, but both professed friends of the common
+people. The story might show that when it comes to a question of
+selfishness men are all alike ready to profit by the unjust conditions.
+However, it must be remembered that those people were only bicyclers. If
+we could have conceived of them as masses we should have known them for
+brothers, and let them in, probably.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+
+
+It is only some six or seven hours by train from London to Aberystwyth,
+but if you will look at the names on a map of the Cambrian railways,
+when you begin the Welsh part of your journey, you will seem to be in a
+stranger and farther country than that of Prester John. Pwllheli, Cerrig
+y Drudion, Gwerful Goch, Festiniog, Bryn Eglwys, Llanidloes, Maertwro,
+Carnedd Fibast, Clynog Fwr, Llan-y-Mawddwy Machynlleth, Duffws, are a
+few out of the hundred names in the hills or along the valleys, giving
+the near neighborhood of England an effect of more than mid-Asian
+remoteness. The eye starts at their look; but if the jaw aches at the
+thought of pronouncing them, it is our own wilful orthographical usage
+that is at fault; the words, whose sound the letters faithfully render,
+are music, and they largely record a Christian civilization which was
+centuries old when the Saxons came to drive the Britons into the western
+mountains and to call them strangers in the immemorial home of their
+race. The Britons of the Roman conquest, who became the Welsh of the
+baffled Saxon invaders, and are the Cymry of their own history and
+poetry, still stand five feet four in their stockings, where they have
+stood from the dawn of time, an inexpugnable host of dark little men,
+defying the Saeseneg in their unintelligible, imperishable speech.
+
+
+I
+
+Of course, except in the loneliest and farthest places, they speak
+English as well as Welsh; and they misplace their aspirates, which they
+lost under the Normans as the Saxons did. But this did not happen to
+them by conquest as it did to the Saxons; they were beguiled of their
+h's when they were cheated with a Welsh-born prince instead of the Welsh
+prince they were promised in the succession of their ancient lines.
+They had been devout Christians, after their manner, in the earliest
+centuries; as the prefix Llan, or Saint, everywhere testifies, the
+country abounded in saints, whose sons inherited their saintship; and
+at the Reformation they became Calvinists as unqualifiedly as their
+kindred, the Bretons, remained Catholics. They have characterized the
+English and Americans with their strong traits in a measure which can
+be dimly traced in the spread of their ten or twenty national names, and
+they have kept even with the most modern ideals quite to the verge of
+co-education in their colleges. It is a fact which no Welshman will
+deny that Cromwell was of Welsh blood. Shakespeare was unquestionably of
+Welsh origin. Henry VII. was that Welsh Twdwr (or Tudor, as the Saeseneg
+misspell it), who set aside the Plantagenet succession, and was the
+grandsire of "the great Elizabeth," not to boast of Bloody Mary or Henry
+VIII. But if these are not enough, there is the present Chancellor of
+the Exchequer, Mr. Lloyd-George, who is now the chief figure of the
+English cabinet.
+
+The bad name which their own half-countryman, Giraldus Cambrensis, gave
+the Welsh in the twelfth century, clings to them yet in the superstition
+of all Norman-minded and Saxon-minded men, so that the Englishman I met
+on the way from Edinburgh was doubtless speaking racially rather than
+personally when he said that the Welsh were the prize liars of the
+universe. I for my part heard no lies in Wales except those I told
+myself; but as I am of Welsh stock, perhaps my experience is not wholly
+refutive of that Englishman's position. I can only urge further the
+noted philological fact that the Welsh language is so full of imagery
+that it is almost impossible to express in it the brute veracities in
+which the English speech is so apt. Otherwise I should say that nowhere
+have I been used with a more immediate and constant sincerity than in
+Wales. The people were polite and they were almost always amiable, but
+in English, at least, they did not say the thing that was not; and their
+politeness was without the servile forms from lower to higher which
+rather weary one in England. They said "Yes," and "No," but as gently as
+if they had always added "Sir." If I have it on my conscience to except
+from my sweeping praise of sincerity the expressman at Aberystwyth who
+promised that our baggage should be at our lodgings in an hour, and did
+not bring it in five, I must add that we arrived on the last day of a
+great agricultural fair, when even the New York Transfer Company might
+have given a promise of more than wonted elasticity.
+
+
+II
+
+In the station of Aberystwyth there were about three or four thousand
+Welshmen of the national height, volubly waiting for the trains to bear
+them away to their farms and villages; but they made way most amiably
+for the dismounting travellers, who in our case were led through them by
+the most energetic porter I ever knew. They did not stare down upon us
+from the unseemly altitude of other national statures, and often during
+our stay I saw like crowds of civil men in the street markets who were
+no taller, and sometimes there were women who had not scaled the heights
+reached by our American girls. They would probably have competed fairly
+well with these in the courses of the colleges to which the Welsh send
+their daughters as well as their sons; but I will not pretend that the
+good looks of either the men or women was of the American average.
+I cannot even say that these contemporary ancient Britons had the
+advantage of the toothless English peasantry in the prompt dentistry
+which is our peculiar blessing. In Great Britain, though I must not say
+Ireland, for I have never been there, a few staggering incisors seem
+a formidable equipment of the jaw in lower-class middle life and even
+tender youth. The difference is a tremendous advantage which, if it does
+not make for the highest character in us, will doubtless stand us in
+good stead in any close with the well-toothed Japanese, and when we are
+beaten, our gold-fillings will go far to pay our indemnity.
+
+After all those thousands at the station had departed, there were still
+visitors enough left in Aberystwyth to distend the hotels uncomfortably;
+and the next morning we set out in the pursuit, always interesting and
+alluring, of lodgings. The town seemed to be pretty full of lodgings,
+but as it was the middle of August, and the very height of the season,
+they were full-up in dismaying measure. We found the only one not kept
+by a Welsh woman in the ostensible keeping of an Englishwoman, a veteran
+cockney landlady, but behind her tottering throne reigned a Welsh
+girl, under whose iron rule we fell as if we had been unworthy Saeseneg
+instead of Cymric-fetched Americans. We had rejected other lodgings
+because, though their keepers had promised to provision us, it always
+appeared that we must go out and do the marketing ourselves. I shall
+lastingly regret that we did not submit to this condition, for it would
+have been one of the best means of studying the local life. But we held
+out for the London custom, and before the Welsh Power, which has
+so often made itself felt behind English thrones, could intervene,
+compliance was promised. After that it remained for the Welsh Power to
+make our stay difficult, and our going easy.
+
+[Illustration: THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH]
+
+Otherwise the place was delightful; it was in almost the centre of the
+long curve of the Victoria Terrace, with windows that looked down upon
+the pebbly beach, and over the blue sea to the bluer stretch of the
+Pembrokeshire hills on the south, and the Carnarvonshire hills on the
+north, holding the lovely waters in their shadowy embrace. There was
+not much shipping, and what there was seemed of the pleasure sort that
+parties go down to the sea to be sick in. The long parade was filled
+at most hours with the English who make the place their resort; whose
+bathing began early in the morning and whose flirting continued far
+into the night, with forenoon and afternoon dawdling and dozing on the
+pebbles. At one end of the Terrace rose a prodigious headland, whose
+slope was scaled over with broken slate, like some mammoth heaving from
+the deep and showing an elephantine hide of bluish gray. At the other
+end was the Amusement Pier, with the co-educational college, which is
+part of the University of Wales, and with divers hotels. Somewhat behind
+and beyond were the ruins of one of those castles which the Normans
+planted with a mailed fist at every vantage in Wales, as their sole
+means of holding down the swarming, squirming, fighting little dark
+people of the country. Even then they could not do it, for the Welsh,
+often overrun, were never conquered, as they will tell you themselves if
+you ask them. But Wales is now perhaps the most peaceful country in the
+world. Its prisons for the most part stand empty (it is said), and the
+people, once so turbulent, are as little given to violence as to vice.
+In fact, I once heard a great Welsh scholar declare that in the old
+times it was not the true Welsh who kept up the fighting, either on the
+public or the private scale, but the Scotch and Irish who had found
+a home among them. In any case, it is true that after the Normans had
+planted their castles in Wales to hold the country, it was all they
+could do to hold the castles, and not till their enemies had imagined
+having the English King's son born in one of them did they bring the
+Welsh under the English crown at last. Even then that uncertain people
+broke from their allegiance now and again; or the Scotch and Irish among
+them did.
+
+
+III
+
+All sorts of sights and sounds might be expected on our Terrace, but
+that which especially warmed the heart of exile in us, and pleased the
+fancy of other sojourners was the appearance, one evening, of a stately
+band of tall men in evening dress and top-hats, with musical instruments
+in their grasp, and heads lifted high above their Welsh following. We
+called the Power behind the Throne to the window in our question and she
+gave a glad cry: "Oh, they're the Neegurs! They're the white Neegurs!"
+and at sight of our compatriotic faces at the pane, these beautiful
+giants took their stand before our house, and burst into the familiar
+music of the log-cabin, the stern-wheel steamboat, and the cornfield, as
+well as the ragtime melodies of later days. It was a rich moment, and
+I know not which joyed in it more, the Welsh Power or the American
+Sufferance.
+
+But here, before I go farther afield, I must note a main difference
+between the Welsh Power and the English slavey to whom she corresponded
+in calling and condition. She was so far educated as to know the
+pseudonym of the friend who came to see us, and to have read his
+writings in the _Welsh Gazette_, treating our proposed triumph in his
+distinction with the fine scorn she used for all our airs. If she had
+been an old-fashioned Yankee Help she could not have been more snubbing;
+but when we had been taught to know our place she was more tolerant, and
+finally took leave of us without rancor.
+
+The notion of the general Welsh education which her intelligence gave us
+was carried indefinitely farther by the grocer's boy to whom our friend
+presented me one evening, after he had been struggling to make me
+understand what an _englyn_ was. I am able now to explain that it is a
+polite stanza which the Welsh send with a present of fruit or flowers,
+or for a greeting upon any worthy occasion. It is rhymed, sometimes
+at both ends of the lines, and sometimes in the middle of them, and it
+presents all the difficulties of euphony which the indomitable Welsh
+glory in overcoming. But when my friend took me in hand, my ignorance
+was of so dense a surface that he could make no impression on it, and he
+said at last, "Let us go into this grocery. There's a boy here who will
+_show_ you what an englyn is," and after I was introduced the kind youth
+did so with pleasure, while he sold candles to one customer, soap to
+another, cheese to another, and herring to another. He first wrote the
+englyn in Welsh, and when I had sufficiently admired it in that tongue
+(for which no atavistic knowledge really served me), he said he would
+put it into English, and he did so. It was then not rhymed at both ends
+or in the middle, but it was rhymed quite enough, and if it had not the
+harp-like sweetness of the original, it was still such a musical stanza
+that I shall always be sorry to have lost it. What I can never lose
+the impression of is the wide-spread literary lore of the common Welsh
+people which the incident suggested. I could not fancy even a Boston
+grocer's boy doing the like; and perhaps this was an uncommon boy in
+Wales itself. He told me a good deal, which I have mainly forgotten,
+about the state of polite learning in his country and in what honor the
+living bards were held. It seems that in that rhyming and singing little
+land, the poets are still known as of old by their bardic names. As
+Jones, or Evans, or Edwards they have no fame beyond other men, but up
+and down all Wales they are celebrated as this bard or that, and are
+honored according to their poetic worth.
+
+
+IV
+
+After the appearance of the White Neegurs on the Terrace, I could hardly
+have expected any livelier appeal to my American pride, and yet it came,
+one day, when I learned that the line of carriages which I saw passing
+our windows were the vehicles bearing to some public function the
+members of the British Chautauqua. How far the name and idea of
+Chautauqua have since spread there is no saying, but it was the last
+of our national inventions which I should have expected to find in
+Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture was reasonably in its line, and the
+Eisteddfod was not out of keeping with the summer conferences held
+beside our lovely up-State lake. The British Chautauqua, as I saw it,
+was a group of people from all parts of the United Kingdom joined in the
+pursuit of improvement and enjoyment, and they were now here on one of
+their summer outings. They had been invited to a gentleman's place not
+far from Aberystwyth to view as indubitable a remnant of the Holy Grail
+as now exists, and it was my very good fortune through the kind offices
+of that friend of ours to be invited with them.
+
+It was a blamelessly rainless afternoon, of a sort commoner on the
+western Welsh coast than on other shores of the "rainy isles," but
+not too common even there; and we drove out of the town through the
+prettiest country of hillside fields and valleys opening to the sea,
+on a road that was fairly dusty in the hot sun. There were cottages,
+grouped and detached, all the way, with gray stone walls and blue slate
+roofs, and in places the children ran out from them with mercenary
+offerings of flowers and song, or with frank pleas for charity direct. I
+yielded with reluctance to the instruction of a Manchester economist in
+my carriage, and denied them, when I would so much rather have abetted
+them in their wicked attempts on our pockets. I remember ruefully still
+that they had voices as sweet and eyes as dark as the children who used
+to chase our wheels in Italy, and I have no doubt they deserved quite as
+well of us as those did.
+
+I got back my spirits when we left our carriages, and I found myself
+walking up a pleasant avenue of wilding trees, with a young Chautauquan
+from Australia who looked as if he might be a young Chautauquan from
+Alabama, tall, and lean, and brown. We fell into talk about the trees,
+and he said how they differed in their green from the sombre gray of his
+native forests; and then he, from that vast far continent of his, spoke
+of the little island where we were, as Home. That has always a strange
+effect for us self-outcasts from the great British roof, and whether it
+makes us smile, or makes us sigh, it never fails to startle us when we
+hear it from colonial lips. The word holds in common kindness Canada and
+India and South Africa and Australia, and it has its pathos in the fact
+that the old mother of these mighty children seems to leave solely to
+them the tenderness that draws them to her in that notion of home.
+
+
+V
+
+There were about fifty of those British Chautauquans, and when they had
+ranged themselves on the grass before the shrubbery of a pleasant lawn,
+backed by a wooded slope, the dignified lady of the house came out with
+a casket in her hand, and put it on a table, and the exercises began.
+Fitly, if the casket really held the sacred relic, they began with
+prayer; then a Welsh soloist followed with a hymn, but whether she
+sang in Welsh or English, I do not remember; I am only sure she sang
+divinely; and then came the speeches. The first of the speeches was by
+our friend, who was the local Unitarian minister, and of a religious
+body not inconsiderable in that Calvinistic Wales. He told us how the
+Holy Grail had been deposited with the monks of Strata Florida, the
+famous old abbey near Aberystwyth; but I forgot who made them this
+trust, unless it was King Arthur's knights, and I am not sure whether
+the fact is matter of legend or history. What I remember is that when
+the abbey was suppressed by Henry VIII., certain of the escaping monks
+came with the relic to the gentle house where we then were, and placed
+it in the keeping of the family who have guarded it ever since.
+
+[Illustration: ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS]
+
+After our friend, the lady of this house took up the tale, and told in
+words singularly choice and simple the story of the sacred relic as the
+family knew it. I had only once before heard a woman speak, no less a
+woman than our great and dear Julia Ward Howe, and it seemed to me
+that she spoke better than any man; and I must say of the Chautauquans'
+hostess, that day, that if ever the Englishwomen come into their full
+political rights, as they seem sure to do, the traditions of good
+sense and good taste in English public speaking will not pass, but
+will prosper on through their orators. There were touches of poetry,
+nationally Welsh, in what she said, and touches of humor perhaps
+personally Welsh. It seems that the cup had been famed throughout the
+countryside for the miraculous property by which whoever drank from it
+was cured of his or her malady, and it had been passed freely round to
+all sufferers ever since it came into her family's keeping. That they
+might make doubly sure of the miracle, it was the custom of the sick
+not only to empty the cup, but to nibble a little bit of the wood, and
+swallow that, so that in whatever state the monks of Strata Florida had
+confided it, the vessel was now in the state we saw. Saying this the
+lady opened the casket holding it, and showed us the crescent-shaped rim
+of a wooden bowl, about the bigness of a cocoanut shell; all the rest
+had been consumed by the pious sufferers whom it had restored to health.
+
+I am sorry, after all, to own that this cup is said by some authorities
+not to be the Holy Grail, but a vessel like it carved out of the true
+cross. But even so subordinate a relic is priceless, and as it is no
+longer possible to drink from it, we may hope that the fragment will
+remain indefinitely to after time. When they had wondered at the sight
+of it the Chautauquans and their friend were made free of the charming
+seventeenth-century house, which would be old for this country, but
+which in the taste of that time was rather modern, and looked like the
+casino of some Italian villa. It abounded, as such houses in England do,
+in the pictured faces of the past, and in the memorials which only the
+centuries can leave behind them, but was too graceful to seem rich. "A
+home of ancient peace," it looked, in its mild gray stone amidst its
+lawns and shrubberies, the larger hold of the gardens and pleasaunces
+through which the Chautauquans followed from it.
+
+
+VI
+
+At Aberystwyth, and elsewhere in Wales, one of the things I noticed was
+the difference of the people from the people over the English border in
+their attitude toward their betters. They might stand only five feet in
+their stockings, but they stood straight, and if they were respectful,
+they were first self-respectful. In our run from Shrewsbury, their
+language first made itself generally heard at Newport, and it increased
+in the unutterable names of the stations westward, the farther we passed
+into their beautiful country, but they had always English enough to be
+civil, though never servile. The country is beautiful in the New
+England measure, but it is of a softer and smaller beauty; it looks more
+caressable; it is like Vermont rather than New Hampshire, and it is
+more like New England than Old England in the greater number of isolated
+farm-houses, from which the girls as well as the boys come to the
+university colleges for learning undreamt of by English farm villagers.
+
+The air was fresh and sweet, and though it seemed to shower wherever
+we stopped to let another train go by on a siding of our single track,
+there was a very passable sense of summer sun. The human type as we
+began to observe it and as we saw it afterward throughout the land was
+not only diminutive, but rather plain and mostly dark, in the men; as to
+the women they were, as they are everywhere, charming, with now and then
+a face of extraordinary loveliness, and nearly always the exquisite West
+of England complexion. In their manners the people could not be more
+amiable than the English, who are as amiable as possible, but they
+seemed brighter and gayer. This remained their effect to the last in
+Aberystwyth, and when one left the Terrace where the English visitors
+superabounded, the Welsh had the whole place to themselves. I would not
+push my conjecture, but it seemed to me that there was an absence of
+the cloying loyalty which makes sojourn in England afflictive to the
+republican spirit; I remember but one shop dedicated to the King's
+Majesty, with the royal arms over the door, though there may have
+been many others; I am always warning the reader not to take me too
+literally.
+
+Though I was about the streets by day and by dark, I saw no disorderly
+behavior of any kind in the town away from the beach; I do not mean
+there was any by the sea, unless some athletic courtship among the young
+people of the watering-place element was to be accounted so. There was
+not much fashion there, except in a few pretty women who recalled the
+church parade of Hyde Park in their flowery and feathery costumes.
+Back in the town there was no fashion at all, but a general decency
+and comfort of dress. The Welsh costume survives almost solely in the
+picture-postal cards, though perhaps in the hilly fastnesses the women
+still wear the steeple-crowned hats which we associate with the notion
+of witches; when they come to market in Aberystwyth they wear
+hard, shiny black straw hats like the men's. Amongst the throng of
+Saturday-night shoppers I saw none of the drunkenness that one sees so
+often in Scottish streets, and in English cities, and, I grieve to say,
+even in some New England towns. In the Welsh quarter Sunday was much
+more the Sabbath than it was on the Terrace, where indeed it seemed a
+day of pleasure rather than praise.
+
+
+VII
+
+All the week I had the best intention of hearing the singing in some of
+the Welsh churches, but my goodwill could not carry the day against the
+fear of a sermon which I should not understand. A chance sermon would
+probably have touched upon the education act which was then stirring
+all Dissenting England and Wales to passive resistance, and from
+Lincolnshire to Carnarvonshire was causing the distraint of tables
+and chairs, tools, hams, clocks, clothing, poultry, and crops for the
+payment of such part of the Dissenters' taxes as would go to the support
+of the Church schools. Possibly it might also have referred to the Walk
+Out of the Welsh Members of Parliament; this was an incident which I
+heard mentioned as of imperial importance, though what caused it or came
+of it I do not know.
+
+Instead of going to church, I strolled up and down the Terrace and
+observed the watering-place life. The town was evidently full, or
+at least all the lodging-houses were, and as it is with the English
+everywhere in their summer resorts, there were men enough to go round,
+so that no poor dear need pine for a mate on that pleasant beach.
+Aberystwyth is therefore to be commended to our overflow of girls,
+though whether there are many eligible noblemen among those youth I have
+not the statistics for saying. All the visitors may have been people
+of rank; I only know that I was told they were mostly from the midland
+cities, and they seemed to be having the good time which people of brief
+outings alone have. The bathing began, as I have noted, very early in
+the day with the men in the briefest possible tights; the women, for
+compensation, wore long trousers with their bathing-skirts, and
+they enhanced the modesty of their effect by the universal use of
+bathing-machines, pushed well away from the curious shore. There was not
+much variety in the visiting English type, but there was here and there
+a sharp imperial accent, as in the two pale little, spindle-legged
+Anglo-Indian boys, with their Hindu ayah, very dark, with sleek dark
+hair, and gleaming eyes in a head not much bigger than a black walnut.
+
+The crescent of the beach was a serried series of hotels and
+lodging-houses, from tip to tip, but back of these were streets
+of homelike, smallish dwellings, that broke rank farther away, and
+scattered about in suburban villas, with trees and flowers and grass
+around them. Beyond stretched, as well as it could stretch among its
+hills, the charming country of fields, and woods, and orchards.
+
+
+VIII
+
+I suppose I did not quite do my duty by the ruins of the Norman castle,
+and I feel that it is now too late to repair my neglect. The stronghold
+was more than once attempted by the Welsh in those wars which make their
+history a catalogue of battles, but it held out Norman till the Normans
+turned English. Owen Glendover took it in 1402, when it was three
+hundred years old, though not yet feeble with age, and in due time one
+of Cromwell's lieutenants destroyed it. Some very picturesque fragments
+remain to attest the grace and strength of the ancient hold. It is
+near the University College and the Amusement Pier, so that the mere
+sight-seers can do all the ordinary objects of interest at Aberystwyth
+in half a day or half an hour. But we were none of these. We had fallen
+in love with the place, and we would fain have stayed on after the
+week was up for which we had taken our lodging. It appeared from a
+house-to-house canvass, that there was no other lodging to be had in all
+that long crescent of the Terrace; or, if this is incredible, there was
+none we would have. Our successors were impending; and though I think
+our English landlady might have invented something for us at the last
+moment, the Welsh Power was inexorable. Her ideal was lodgers who would
+go out and buy their own provisions, and we had set our faces against
+that. Some one must yield, and the Welsh Power could not; it was not in
+her nature. We were therefore in a manner expelled from Aberystwyth, but
+our banishment was not from all Wales, and this was how we went next to
+Llandudno.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+
+
+Froissart's saying, if it was Froissart's, that the English amuse
+themselves sadly antedates that notion of Merry England which is now
+generally rejected by serious observers. I should myself prefer the
+agnostic position, and say that I did not know whether the English were
+glad or not when they looked gay. What I seem to be certain of, but I
+do not say that I am certain, is that they look gayer in their places
+of amusement than we do. I do not mean theatres, or parliaments, or
+music-halls, or lecture-rooms, by places of amusement, but what we
+call summer resorts a little more largely than those resorts which the
+English call watering-places. Of these I should like to take as a type
+the charming summer resort on the coast of North Wales which is called
+Llandudno in print, and in speech several different ways.
+
+
+I
+
+The English simply and frankly, after their blunt nature, call the place
+Landudno, but the Welsh call it, according to one superstition of their
+double _l_ and their French _u_, Thlandidno. According to another, we
+cannot spell it in English at all; but it does not much matter, for
+the last superstition is the ever-delightful but ever-doubtful George
+Borrow's, who says that the Welsh _ll_ is the same as the Spanish _ll_,
+but who is probably mistaken, most other authorities agreeing that if
+you pronounce it _lhl_ you will come as near it as any Saeseneg need.
+It is a constantly besetting question in Wales, where the prefix _Llan_
+speckles the map all over, owing to that multitude of Saints who peopled
+the country in the times when a Saint's sons were every one saints, and
+none was of particularly holy, or even good life, because he was known
+for a saint. Like a continental noble, he inherited his title equally
+with all his brothers.
+
+But through whatever orthoepic mazes you search it, Llandudno has every
+claim on your regard and admiration. Like Aberystwyth, its sea front is
+a shallow crescent, but vaster, with a larger town expanding back of it,
+and with loftier and sublimer headlands, at either end, closing it in a
+more symmetrical frame. But I should say that its sea was not so blue,
+or its sky either, and its air was not so soft or dry. Morally it is
+more constantly lively, with a greater and more insistent variety of
+entertainments. For the American its appeal might well have begun with
+the sight of his country's flag floating over a tennis-ground at the
+neighboring watering-place and purer Welsh town of Rhyl. The approach to
+his affections was confirmed by another American flag displayed before
+one of the chief hotels in Llandudno itself. I learned afterward of the
+landlord that this was because there were several Chicago families in
+his house, and fifteen Americans in all; but why the tennis-ground of
+Rhyl flew our national banner, I do not know to this day. It was
+indeed that gentle moment when our innocent people believed themselves
+peculiarly dear to the English, and might naturally suppose, if from
+Chicago, or Boston, or Denver, that the English would wish to see as
+often as possible the symbol of our successful revolt from the princes
+and principles to which they have religiously adhered.
+
+[Illustration: LLANDUDNO--THE CITY AND HARBOR]
+
+Both that home of the patriotic Chicago families, and the other best
+hotel were too full for us, and after a round of the second-best we
+decided for lodgings, hoping as usual that they would bring us nearer
+the native life. The best we could get, facing the sea midway of the
+crescent, were not exactly Welsh in their keeping. The landladies were,
+in fact, two elderly Church-of-England sisters from Dublin, who had
+named their house out of a novel they had read. They said they believed
+the name was Italian, and the reader shall judge if it were so from its
+analogue of Osier Wood. The maids in the house, however, were very truly
+and very wickedly Welsh: two tough little ponies of girls, who tied
+their hair up with shoe-strings, and were forbidden, when about their
+work, to talk Welsh together, lest they should speak lezing of those
+Irish ladies. The rogues were half English, but the gentle creature
+who served our table was wholly Welsh; small, sweet-voiced, dark-eyed,
+intelligent, who suffered from the universal rheumatism of the British
+Isles, but kept steadily to her duty, and accepted her fate with
+patience and even cheerfulness. She waited on several other tables, for
+the house was full of lodgers, all rather less permanent than ourselves,
+who were there for a fortnight; we found our landladies hoping, when we
+said we were going, to have had us with them through the winter.
+
+
+II
+
+Our fellow-lodgers were quiet people of divers degrees, except perhaps
+the highest, unless the nobility bring boiled hams with them when they
+visit the seaside. The boiled ham of the drawing-room floor was frankly
+set out on the hall table, where it seemed to last a week, or at least
+till the lodgers went away. There was much coming and going, for it was
+the height of the season, with the prices at flood tide. We paid six
+guineas a week for three bedrooms and a sitting-room; but our landladies
+owned it was dear. An infirm and superannuated sideboard served for a
+dressing-table in one room; in others the heavier pieces of furniture
+stood sometimes on four legs, sometimes on three. We had the advantage
+of two cats on the back fence, and a dog in the back yard; but if the
+controversy between them was carried on in Welsh, it is no wonder we
+never knew what it was about.
+
+Our hostesses said the Welsh were dirty housekeepers: "At least _we_
+think so," but I am bound to say their own cooking was very good; and
+not being Welsh our hostesses consented to market for us, except in the
+article of Spanish melons: these I bought myself of increasing cost and
+size. When I alleged, the second morning, that the melon then sold
+me for sixpence had been sold me by another boy for fourpence the day
+before, my actual Cymric youth said, "Then he asked you too little,"
+which seemed a _non sequitur_ but was really an unexpected stroke of
+logic.
+
+It was the utmost severity used with me by my co-racials in Llandudno.
+They were in the great majority of the permanent inhabitants, but they
+were easily outnumbered among the pleasurers by the Saeseneg, whose
+language prevailed, so that a chance word of Welsh now and then was all
+that I heard in the streets. Some faint stirrings of ambition to follow
+the language as far as a phrase-book would lead were not encouraged by
+the kindly bookseller who took my money for it; and I did not go on. It
+is a loss for me in literature which translation cannot supply, for
+the English lovers of Welsh poetry, after praising it to the skies,
+are never able to produce anything which is not direly mechanical and
+vacuous. The native charm somehow escapes them; the grace beyond the
+reach of art remains with the Cymric poets who have resources for its
+capture unknown to their English admirers. George Borrow seems the worst
+failure in this sort, and the worst offender in giving his reader the
+hopes he never fulfils, so that his _Wild Wales_ is a desert of blighted
+literary promises. I believe that the merit of Welsh poetry dwells
+largely, perhaps overlargely, in its intricate technique, and in the
+euphonic changes which leave the spoken word ready for singing almost
+without the offices of the composer.
+
+
+III
+
+One of the great musical contests, the yearly national Eisteddfod, was
+taking place that year at the neighboring town of Rhyl, but I did not go
+to hear it, not being good for a week's music without intermission.
+At Llandudno there was only the music of the Pierrots and the Niggers,
+which those simple-hearted English have borrowed, the one from
+France and the other from these States. Their passion for our colored
+minstrelsy is, in fact, something pathetic. They like Pierrots well
+enough, and Pierrots _are_ amusing, there is no doubt of it; but they
+dote upon Niggers, as they call them with a brutality unknown among us
+except to the vulgarest white men and boys, and the negroes themselves
+in moments of exasperation. Negro minstrelsy is almost extinct in the
+land of its birth, but in the land of its adoption it flourishes in the
+vigor of undying youth: no watering-place is genuine without it. Bands
+of Niggers haunt the streets and suburbs of London, and apparently every
+high day or holiday throughout the British Islands requires the stamp of
+their presence as a nostrum requires the name of the patentee blown in
+the bottle. The decay of their gay science began among us with the fall
+of slavery, and the passing of the old plantation life; but as these
+never existed in Great Britain the English version of negro minstrelsy
+is not affected by their disappearance. It is like the English tradition
+of the Red Skins, which has all but vanished from our superstition, but
+remains as powerful as ever in the constant fancy of those islanders.
+
+The English like their Niggers very, very black, and as their Niggers
+are English they know how to gratify the national preference: such a
+spread of scarlet lips over half the shining sable face is known nowhere
+else in nature or art; and it must have been in despair of rivalling
+their fellow-minstrels that the small American troupe we saw at
+Aberystwyth went to the opposite extreme and frankly appeared as the
+White Neegurs. At Llandudno the blackness of the Niggers was absolute,
+so that it almost darkened the day as they passed our lodging, along the
+crescent of the beach on their way to their open-air theatre beyond it.
+They were followed by a joyous retinue of boys and girls, tradesmen's
+apprentices, donkeys, bath-chairs, and all the movable gladness of the
+watering-place, to the music of their banjos and the sound of their
+singing. They were going to a fold of the foot-hills called the Happy
+Valley, bestowed on the public for such pleasures by the local nobleman
+whose title is given to a principal street, and to other points and
+places, I suppose out of the public pride and gratitude. It is a
+charming amphitheatre overlooked by the lofty tops around, and there
+on the green slope the Niggers had set up their stage, and ranged the
+spectators' chairs in the classification of first, second, and third so
+dear to the British soul. There they cracked their jokes, and there they
+sang their songs; the songs were newer than the jokes, but they were
+both kinds delivered with a strong Cockney accent, and without an
+aspirate in its place. But it was all richly acceptable to the audience,
+who laughed and cheered and joined in the chorus when asked. Here,
+as everywhere, the crowd delighted equally in songs of the sloppiest
+sentimentality and of humor nighest indecency.
+
+[Illustration: LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME'S NECK]
+
+On the afternoon of our visit the good lady next me could not contain
+her peculiar pride in the entertainment, and confided that she knew the
+leader of the troupe, who was an old friend of her husband's. It was
+indeed a time and place that invited to expansion. Nothing could have
+been friendlier and livelier than the spectacle of the spectators spread
+over the grassy slope, or sublimer than the rise of the hills around, or
+more enchanting than the summer sea, with the large and little shipping
+on it, and the passenger-steamers going and coming from Liverpool and
+all the points in the region round. The two headlands which mark the
+limits of the beautiful beach, Great Orme's Head, and Little Orme's
+Head, are both of a nobleness tempered to kindliness by the soft and
+manageable beauty of their forms. I never got quite so far as Little
+Orme's Head, for it was full two miles from our lodging, and a fortnight
+was not long enough for the journey, but with Great Orme's Head I was on
+terms of very tolerable intimacy. A road of the excellence peculiar to
+England passes round on the chin, so to speak, and though I never went
+the length of it, I went far enough to know the majesty of the seaward
+prospect. From the crown of the Head there is a view of perhaps all the
+mountains in Wales, which from this point appears entirely composed of
+mountains, blue, blue and enchantingly fair. On the townward side you
+may descend into the Happy Valley, as we did, and find always a joyous
+crowd listening to the Niggers. If, after some doubt of your way, you
+have the favor of a nice boy and an intelligent collie dog, whom the boy
+is helping herd home the evening cows of a pleasant farm, you will
+have a charming glimpse of the local civilization; and perhaps you will
+notice that the cows do not pay much attention to the boy, but obey the
+dog implicitly; it is their Old World convention.
+
+
+IV
+
+From another side we had ascended the mountain by the tram line which
+climbs it to the top, and at every twist and turn lavishes some fresh
+loveliness of landscape upon your vision. Near by, we noticed many
+depressions and sinkages in the ground, and a conversable man in
+well-oiled overalls who joined us at a power-house, said it was from the
+giving way of the timbers in the disused copper-mines. Were they very
+old, we asked, and he said they had not been worked for forty years; but
+this, when you come to think of the abandoned Roman mines yet deeper
+in the hill, was a thing of yesterday. The man in the oily overalls
+had evidently not come to think of it, but he was otherwise a very
+intelligent mechanic, and of a hospitable mind, like all the rest of our
+chance acquaintance in Great Britain. I do not know that I like to think
+of those Roman mines myself, where it is said the sea now surges back
+and forth: they must have been worked by British slaves, who may be
+fancied climbing purblindly out when the legions left Britain, and not
+joining very loudly in the general lamentation at their withdrawal,
+but probably tempering the popular grief with the reflection that the
+heathen Saxons could not be much worse.
+
+The hill-top was covered with the trippers who seem perpetually
+holidaying on their island, and who were always kind to their children
+when they had them, and to each other when they had not. They were
+commonly in couples, very affectionate and inoffensively young. They
+wandered about, and from time to time went and had tea at one of the
+tea-houses which are always at hand over there. Except the view there
+was not much to see; the ways were rough; now and then you came to a
+pink cottage or a white one where the peasantry, again, sold tea. At one
+place in our walk over the occiput of Great Orme's Head into the Happy
+Valley in its bosom, we fell a prey to a conspiracy of boys selling
+mignonette: it appeared to be a mignonette trust, or syndicate,
+confining its commerce to that flower.
+
+I have no other statistics to offer concerning business on Great Orme's
+Head, or indeed in all Llandudno. One of the chief industries seemed to
+be coaching, for a score of delightful places are to be easily reached
+by the stages always departing from the hotels on the Parade. There was
+no particularly noticeable traffic in leek, though I suppose that as I
+did not see the national emblem in any Welshman's hat--to be sure, it
+was not St. David's Day--it must have been boiling in every Welshman's
+pot. I am rather ashamed to be joining, even at this remove, in the poor
+English joking which goes on about the Welsh, quite as much as about the
+Scotch, the Irish having become too grave a matter for joking. There
+are little burlesque manuals making merry with the language and its
+agglutinative prolixity, which I shall certainly not quote; and
+there are postal-cards representing Welsh dames drinking tea in tall
+witch-hats, with one of them saying: "I wass enjoying myself shocking,
+look you." There was, of course, nothing serious in this joking; the
+Welsh, who have all the small commerce in their hands, gladly sold the
+manuals and postals, and I did not see one Englishman laughing over
+them.
+
+The Saeseneg visitors rather amused themselves with the sea and the
+resources of the beach and the bathing. As contrasted with the visitors
+at Aberystwyth, so distinctly in the earlier and later stages of
+love-making, I should say those at Llandudno were domestic: fathers and
+mothers who used the long phalanx of bathing-machines appointed to their
+different sexes, and their children who played in the sand. I thought
+the children charming, and I contributed tuppence to aid in the repair
+of the sand castle of two nice little boys which had fallen down; it now
+seems strange that I should have been asked for a subscription, but in
+England subscriptions spare nobody; though I wonder if two such nice
+little boys would have come to me for money in America. Besides the
+entertainment of lying all afternoon on the beach, or sitting beside it
+in canopied penny chairs, there was more active diversion for all ages
+and sexes in the circus prevailing somewhere in the background,
+and advertising itself every afternoon by a procession of six young
+elephants neatly carrying each in his trunk the tail of the elephant
+before him. There were also the delightful shows of the amusement pier
+where one could go and see Pierrots to one's heart's content, if one can
+ever get enough of Pierrots; I never can.
+
+[Illustration: THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO]
+
+Besides all these daytime things there were two very good theatres, at
+one of which I saw Mr. Barrie's _Little Mary_ given better than in New
+York (that was easy), and at the other a comic opera, with a bit of
+comedy or tragedy in a stage-box, not announced in the bills. The
+audience was otherwise decorous enough to be composed of Welsh Baptist
+elders and their visiting friends, but in this box there were two young
+men in evening dress, scuffling with a young woman in dinner d�collet�e,
+and what appeared to be diamonds in her ears. They were trying,
+after what seems the convention of English seaside flirtation, to get
+something out of her hand, and allowing her successfully to resist them;
+and their playful contest went on through a whole act to the distraction
+of the spectators, who did not seem greatly scandalized. It suggested
+the misgiving that perhaps bad people came to Llandudno for their summer
+outing as well as good; but there was no interference by the police or
+the management with this robust side-show. Were the actors in the scene,
+all or any of them, too high in rank to be lightly molested in their
+lively event; or were they too low? Perhaps they were merely tipsy,
+but all the same their interlude was a contribution to the evening's
+entertainment which would not have been so placidly accepted in, say,
+Atlantic City, or Coney Island, or even Newport, where people are said
+to be more accustomed to the caprices of society persons, and more
+indulgent of their whims.
+
+
+V
+
+A more improving, and on the whole more pleasing, phase of the
+indigenous life, and also more like a phase of our own, showed itself
+the day of our visit to Conway, a little way from Llandudno. There, on
+our offering to see the ruins of the wonderful and beautiful old castle,
+we were met at the entrance with a demand for an exceptional shilling
+gate money, because of the fair for the local Wesleyan Chapel which was
+holding in the interior. What seemed at first a hardship turned out a
+chance which we would not have missed on any account. There was a large
+tent set up in the old castle court, and a table spread with home-made
+dainties of many sorts, and waited upon by gentle maids and matrons who
+served one with tea or whatever else one liked, all for that generously
+inclusive shilling. They were Welsh, they told us, and they were
+speaking their language to right and left of us, while they were so
+courteous to us in English. It was quite like a church fair in some
+American village, where, however, it could not have had the advantage
+of a ruined Norman castle for its scene, and where it would not have
+provided a range for target practice with air-guns, or grounds for
+running and jumping.
+
+The place was filled with people young and old who were quietly amusing
+themselves and were more taken up with the fair than with the castle.
+I must myself comparatively slight the castle in the present study of
+people rather than places, though I may note that if there is any
+more interesting ruin in the world, I am satisfied with this which it
+surpasses. Besides its beauty, what strikes one most is its perfect
+adaptation to the original purpose of palace and fortress for which the
+Normans planned their strongholds in Wales. The architect built not only
+with a constant instinct of beauty, but with unsurpassable science and
+skill. The skill and the science have gone the way of the need of them,
+but the beauty remains indelible and as eternal as the hunger for it
+in the human soul. Conway castle is not all a ruin, even as a fortress,
+however. Great part of it still challenges decay, and is so entire in
+its outward shape that it has inspired the railway running under its
+shoulder to attempt a conformity of style in the bridge approaching it,
+but without enabling it to an equal effect of grandeur. One would as
+soon the bridge had not tried.
+
+All Conway is worthy, within its ancient walls, of as much devotion as
+one can render it in the rain, which begins as soon as you leave the
+castle. The walls climb from the waters to the hills, and the streets
+wander up and down and seem to the stranger mainly to seek that
+beautiful old Tudor house, Plas Mawr, which like the castle is without
+rival in its kind. It was full of reeking and streaming sight-seers,
+among whom one could easily find one's self incommoded without feeling
+one's self a part of the incommodation, but in spite of them there was
+the assurance of comfort as well as splendor in the noble old mansion,
+such as the Elizabethan houses so successfully studied. In the
+dining-room a corner of the mantel has its sandstone deeply worn
+away, and a much-elbowed architect, who was taking measurements of the
+chimney, agreed that this carf was the effect of the host or the butler
+flying to the place and sharpening his knife for whatever haunch of
+venison or round of beef was toward. It was a fine memento of the
+domestic past, and there was a secret chamber where the refugees of this
+cause or that in other times were lodged in great discomfort. Besides,
+there was a ghost which was fairly crowded out of its accustomed
+quarters, where so far from being able to walk, it would have had much
+ado to stand upright by flattening itself against the wall.
+
+
+VI
+
+In fact, there was not much more room that day in the Plas Mawr, than in
+the Smallest House in the World, which is the next chiefest attraction
+of Conway. This, too, was crammed with damp enthusiasts, passionately
+eager to sign their names in the guest-book. They scarcely left space in
+the sitting-room of ten by twelve feet for the merry old hostess selling
+photographs and ironically inviting her visitors' guests to a glimpse
+of the chamber overhead, or so much of it as the bed allowed to be seen.
+She seemed not to believe in her abode as a practicable tenement, and
+could not be got to say that she actually lived in it; as to why it was
+built so small she was equally vague. But there it was, to like or to
+leave, and there, not far off, was the "briny beach" where the Walrus
+and the Carpenter walked together,--
+
+     "And wept like anything to see
+      Such quantities of sand."
+
+For it was in Conway, as history or tradition is, that _Through the
+Looking-Glass_ was written.
+
+There are very few places in those storied British Isles which are
+not hallowed by some association with literature; but I suppose that
+Llandudno is as exempt as any can be, and I will not try to invoke any
+dear and honored shade from its doubtful obscurity. We once varied the
+even tenor of our days there by driving to Penmaenmawr, and wreaking our
+love of literary associations so far as we might by connecting the place
+with the memory of Gladstone, who was literary as well as political. We
+thought with him that Penmaenmawr was "the most charming watering-place
+in Wales," and as you drive into the place, the eye of faith will
+detect the house, on the right, in which he spent many happy summers. We
+contented ourselves with driving direct to the principal hotel, where
+I know not what kept us from placing ourselves for life. We had tea and
+jam en the pretty lawn, and the society of a large company of wasps of
+the yellow-jacket variety, which must have been true Welsh wasps, as
+peaceful as they were musical, and no interloping Scotch or Irish, for
+they did not offer to attack us, but confined themselves altogether to
+our jam: to be sure, we thought best to leave it to them.
+
+[Illustration: CONWAY CASTLE]
+
+It is said that the purple year is not purpler at any point on the
+southernmost shores of England than it is at Llandudno. In proof of the
+mildness of its winter climate, the presence of many sorts of tender
+evergreens is alleged, and the persistence of flowers in blooming from
+Christmas to Easter. But those who have known the deceitful habits of
+flowers on the Riviera, where they bloom in any but an arctic degree of
+cold, will not perhaps hurry to Llandudno much later than November.
+All the way to Penmaenmawr the flowers showed us what they could do in
+summer, whether in field or garden, and there was one beautiful hill
+on which immense sweeps and slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather
+boldly stretched separately, or mingled their dyes in the fearlessness
+of nature when she spurns the canons of art. I suppose there is no
+upholsterer or paperhanger who would advise mixing or matching yellow
+and purple in the decoration of a room, but here the outdoor effect rapt
+the eye in a transport of delight. It was indeed a day when almost any
+arrangement of colors would have pleased.
+
+
+VII
+
+It is not easy in that much summer-resorted region to get at the country
+in other than its wilder moods; it is either town or mountain; but now
+and then one found one's self among harvest-fields, where the yield of
+wheat and oats was far heavier than with us, either because the soil was
+richer or the tilth thorougher. The farms indeed looked very fertile,
+and the farmhouses very alluringly clean and neat, at least on the
+outside. They were not gray, as in the West of England, or brick as
+in the Southeast, but were of stone whitewashed, and the roofs were of
+slate, and not thatch or tile. As I have noted, they were not so much
+gathered into villages as in England, and again, as I have noted, it
+is out of such houses that the farmers' boys and girls go to the
+co-educational colleges of the Welsh University. It is still the
+preference of the farmers that their sons should be educated for the
+ministry, which in that country of multiplied dissents has pulpits for
+every color of contrary-mindedness, as well as livings of the not yet
+disestablished English Church. It is not indeed the English Church in
+speech. The Welsh will have their service and their sermon in their own
+tongue, and when an Oxford or Cambridge man is given a Welsh living, he
+must do what he can to conform to the popular demand. It is said that
+in one case, where the incumbent long held out against the parish,
+he compromised by reading the service in Welsh with the English
+pronunciation. But the Welsh churches are now supplied with
+Welsh-speaking clergy, though whether it is well for the Welsh to cling
+so strongly to their ancient speech is doubted by many Welshmen. These
+hold that it cramps and dwarfs the national genius; but in the mean time
+in Ireland the national genius, long enlarged to our universal English,
+offers the strange spectacle of an endeavor to climb back into its
+Gaelic shell.
+
+[Illustration: PLAS MAWR]
+
+I do not know whether an incident of my experience in coming from
+Chester to Llandudno is to be offered as an illustration of Welsh
+manners or of English manners. A woman of the middle rank, certainly
+below gentlewoman, but very personable and well dressed, got into our
+carriage where there was no seat for her. She was no longer young, but
+she was not so old as the American who offered her his seat. She refused
+it, but consented to sit on the hand-bag and rug which he arranged for
+her, and so remained till she left the train, while a half-grown boy
+and several young men kept their countenances and their places, not
+apparently dreaming of offering her a seat, or if they thought of her
+at all, thought she was well punished for letting the guard crowd her
+in upon us. By her stature and complexion she was undoubtedly Welsh, and
+these youth from theirs were as undoubtedly English. Perhaps, then, the
+incident had better be offered as an illustration of Welsh and English
+manners combined.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER
+
+
+Nothing is so individual in any man as the peculiar blend of
+characteristics which he has inherited from his racial ancestries. The
+Englishman, who leaves the stamp of the most distinct personality upon
+others, is the most mixed, the most various, the most relative of all
+men. He is not English except as he is Welsh, Dutch, and Norman, with
+"a little Latin and less Greek" from his earliest visitors and invaders.
+This conception of him will indefinitely simplify the study of his
+nature if it is made in the spirit of the frank superficiality which I
+propose to myself. After the most careful scrutiny which I shall be
+able to give him, he will remain, for every future American, the
+contradiction, the anomaly, the mystery which I expect to leave him.
+
+
+I
+
+No error of the Englishman's latest invader is commoner than the notion,
+which perhaps soonest suggests itself, that he is a sort of American,
+tardily arriving at our kind of consciousness, with the disadvantages
+of an alien environment, after apparently hopeless arrest in unfriendly
+conditions. The reverse may much more easily be true; we may be a sort
+of Englishmen, and the Englishman, if he comes to us and abides with
+us, may become a sort of American. But that is the affair of a possible
+future, and the actual Englishman is certainly not yet any sort of
+American, unless, indeed, for good and for bad, he is a better sort
+of Bostonian. He does not even speak the American language, whatever
+outlandish accent he uses in speaking his own. It may be said, rather
+too largely, too loosely, that the more cultivated he is, the more he
+will speak like a cultivated American, until you come to the King,
+or the Royal Family, with whom a strong German accent is reported to
+prevail. The Englishman may write American, if he is a very good
+writer, but in no case does he spell American. He prefers, as far as
+he remembers it, the Norman spelling, and, the Conqueror having said
+"_ge�le_," the Conquered print "gaol," which the American invader must
+pronounce "jail," not "gayol."
+
+The mere mention of the Royal Family advances us to the most marked of
+all the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is
+not superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned
+principle, but a passion induced by the general volition. Whatever
+it is, it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly
+pervasive of the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago--say, fifteen
+or twenty--it was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known
+at all with many in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges, or
+the time of the happy-go-lucky sailor William; in the earlier time of
+Victoria, it was a chivalrous devotion among the classes, and with the
+masses an affection which almost no other sovereign has inspired. I
+should not be going farther than some Englishmen if I said that her
+personal character saved the monarchy; when she died there was not a
+vestige of the republican dream which had remained from a sentiment
+for "the free peoples of antiquity" rather than from the Commonwealth.
+Democracy had indeed effected itself in a wide-spread socialism, but the
+kingship was safe in the hearts of the Queen's subjects when the Prince
+of Wales, who was the first of them, went about praising loyalty as
+prime among the civic virtues and duties. The notion took the general
+fancy, and met with an acceptance in which the old superstition of kings
+by divine right was resuscitated with the vulgar. One of the vulgar
+lately said to an American woman who owned that we did not yield an
+equal personal fealty to all our Presidents, "Oh yes, but you know that
+it is only your _people_ that choose the President, but _God_ gave us
+the King." Nothing could be opposed to a belief so simple, as in the
+churches of the eldest faith the humble worshipper could not well be
+told that the picture or the statue of his adoration was not itself
+sacred. In fact, it is not going too far, at least for a very
+adventurous spirit, to say that loyalty with the English is a sort of
+religious principle. What is with us more or less a joke, sometimes
+bad, sometimes good, namely, our allegiance to the powers that be in the
+person of the Chief Magistrate, is with them a most serious thing, at
+which no man may smile without loss.
+
+I was so far from wishing myself to smile at it, that I darkled most
+respectfully about it, without the courage to inquire directly into the
+mystery. If it was often on my tongue to ask, "What is loyalty? How
+did you come by it? Why are you loyal?"--I felt that it would be
+embarrassing when it would not be offensive, and I should vainly plead
+in excuse that this property of theirs mystified me the more because it
+seemed absolutely left out of the American nature. I perceived that in
+the English it was not less really present because it was mixed, or used
+to be mixed, with scandal that the alien can do no more than hint at.
+That sort of abuse has long ceased, and if one were now to censure the
+King, or any of the Royal Family, it would be felt to be rather ill
+bred, and quite unfair, since royalty is in no position to reply to
+criticism. Even the Socialists would think it ill-mannered, though
+in their hearts, if not in their sleeves, they must all the while be
+smiling at the notion of anything sacred in the Sovereign.
+
+[Illustration: A PRESENTATION AT COURT]
+
+
+II
+
+Loyalty, like so many other things in England, is a convention to which
+the alien will tacitly conform in the measure of his good taste or his
+good sense. It is not his affair, and in the mean time it is a most
+curious and interesting spectacle; but it is not more remarkable,
+perhaps, than the perfect acquiescence in the aristocratic forms of
+society which hedge the King with their divinity. We think that family
+counts for much with ourselves, in New England or in Virginia; but it
+counts for nothing at all in comparison with the face value at which it
+is current in England. We think we are subject to our plutocracy, when
+we are very much out of humor or out of heart, in some such measure as
+the commoners of England are subject to the aristocracy; but that is
+nonsense. A very rich man with us is all the more ridiculous for his
+more millions; he becomes a byword if not a hissing; he is the meat of
+the paragrapher, the awful example of the preacher; his money is found
+to smell of his methods. But in England, the greater a nobleman is,
+the greater his honor. The American mother who imagines marrying her
+daughter to an English duke, cannot even imagine an English
+duke--say, like him of Devonshire, or him of Northumberland, or him
+of Norfolk--with the social power and state which wait upon him in his
+duchy and in the whole realm; and so is it in degree down to the latest
+and lowest of the baronets, and of those yet humbler men who have been
+knighted for their merits and services in medicine, in literature, in
+art. The greater and greatest nobles are established in a fear which is
+very like what the fear of God used to be when the common people feared
+Him; and, though they are potent political magnates, they mainly rule
+as the King himself does, through the secular reverence of those beneath
+them for their titles and the visible images of their state. They are
+wealthy men, of course, with so much substance that, when one now and
+then attempts to waste it, he can hardly do so; but their wealth alone
+would not establish them in the popular regard. His wealth does no
+such effect for Mr. Astor in England; and mere money, though it is much
+desired by all, is no more venerated in the person of its possessor than
+it is with us. It is ancestry, it is the uncontested primacy of families
+first in their place, time out of mind, that lays its resistless hold
+upon the fancy and bows the spirit before it. By means of this comes
+the sovereign effect in the political as well as the social state; for,
+though the people vote into or out of power those who vote other people
+into or out of the administration, it is always--or so nearly always
+that the exception proves the rule--family that rules, from the King
+down to the least attach� of the most unimportant embassy. No doubt many
+of the English are restive under the fact; and, if one had asked their
+mind about it, one might have found them frank enough; but, never asking
+it, it was with amusement that I heard said once, as if such a thing had
+never occurred to anybody before, "Yes, isn't it strange that those few
+families should keep it all among themselves!" It was a slender female
+voice, lifted by a young girl with an air of pensive surprise, as at a
+curious usage of some realm of faery.
+
+
+III
+
+England is in fact, to the American, always a realm of faery, in its
+political and social constitution. It must be owned, concerning the
+government by family, that it certainly seems to work well. That
+justifies it, so far as the exclusion of the immense majority from the
+administration of their own affairs can be justified by anything;
+though I hold that the worst form of graft in office is hardly less
+justifiable: that is, at least, one of the people picking their pockets.
+But it is the universal make-believe behind all the practical virtue of
+the state that constitutes the English monarchy a realm of faery. The
+whole population, both the great and the small, by a common effort of
+the will, agree that there is a man or a woman of a certain line who
+can rightfully inherit the primacy amongst them, and can be dedicated
+through this right to live the life of a god, to be so worshipped and
+flattered, so cockered about with every form of moral and material
+flummery, that he or she may well be more than human not to be made a
+fool of. Then, by a like prodigious stroke of volition, the inhabitants
+of the enchanted island universally agree that there is a class of them
+which can be called out of their names in some sort of title, bestowed
+by some ancestral or actual prince, and can forthwith be something
+different from the rest, who shall thenceforth do them reverence, them
+and their heirs and assigns, forever. By this amusing process, the realm
+of faery is constituted, a thing which could not have any existence in
+nature, yet by its existence in fancy becomes the most absolute of human
+facts.
+
+It is not surprising that, in the conditions which ensue, snobbishness
+should abound; the surprising thing would be if it did not abound. Even
+with ourselves, who by a seven years' struggle burst the faery dream a
+century ago, that least erected spirit rears its loathly head from the
+dust at times, and in our polite press we can read much if we otherwise
+see nothing of its subtle influence. But no evil is without its
+compensating good, and the good of English snobbishness is that it
+has reduced loyalty, whether to the prince or to the patrician, from a
+political to a social significance. That is, it does so with the upper
+classes; with the lower, loyalty finds expression in an unparalleled
+patriotism. An Englishman of the humble or the humbler life may know
+very well that he is not much in himself; but he believes that England
+stands for him, and that royalty and nobility stand for England. Both
+of these, there, are surrounded by an atmosphere of reverence wholly
+inconceivable to the natives of a country where there are only
+millionaires to revere.
+
+
+IV
+
+The most curious thing is that the persons in the faery dream seem to
+believe it as devoutly as the simplest and humblest of the dreamers. The
+persons in the dream apparently take themselves as seriously as if there
+were or could be in reality kings and lords. They could not, of course,
+do so if they were recently dreamed, as they were, say, in the France
+of the Third Empire. There, one fancies, these figments must have always
+been smiling in each other's faces when they were by themselves. But
+the faery dream holds solidly in England because it is such a very old
+dream. Besides, the dream does not interfere with the realities; it even
+honors them. If a man does any great thing in England, the chief figure
+of the faery dream recognizes his deed, stoops to him, lifts him up
+among the other figures, and makes him part of the dream forever. After
+that he has standing, such as no man may have with us for more than that
+psychological moment, when all the papers cry him up, and then everybody
+tries to forget him. But, better than this, the dream has the effect, if
+it has not the fact, of securing every man in his place, so long as
+he keeps to it. Nowhere else in the world is there so much personal
+independence, without aggression, as in England. There is apparently
+nothing of it in Germany; in Italy, every one is so courteous and kind
+that there is no question of it; in the French Republic and in our own,
+it exists in an excess that is molestive and invasive; in England alone
+does it strike the observer as being of exactly the just measure.
+
+Very likely the observer is mistaken, and in the present case he will
+not insist. After all, even the surface indications in such matters are
+slight and few. But what I noted was that, though the simple and humble
+have to go to the wall, and for the most part go to it unkicking, in
+England they were, on their level, respectfully and patiently entreated.
+At a railroad junction one evening, when there was a great hurrying up
+stairs and down, and a mad seeking of wrong trains by right people, the
+company's servants who were taking tickets, and directing passengers
+this way and that, were patiently kind with futile old men and women,
+who came up, in the midst of their torment, and pestered them with
+questions as to the time when trains that had not arrived would leave
+after they did arrive. I shuddered to think what would have at least
+verbally happened to such inquirers with us; but, there, not only their
+lives but their feelings were safe, and they could go away with such
+self-respect as they had quite intact.
+
+
+V
+
+In no country less good-hearted than England could anything so
+wrong-headed as the English baggage system be suffered. But, there,
+passengers of all kinds help the porters to sort their trunks from other
+people's trunks, on arrival at their stations, and apparently think it
+no hardship. The porters, who do not seem especially inspired persons,
+have a sort of guiding instinct in the matter, and wonderfully seldom
+fail to get the things together for the cab, or to get them off the cab,
+and, duly labelled, into the luggage-van. Once, at a great junction,
+my porter seemed to have missed my train, and after vain but not
+unconsidered appeals to the guard, I had to start without it. At
+the next station, the company telegraphed back at its own cost the
+voluminous message of my anxiety and indignation, and I was assured that
+the next train would bring my valise from Crewe to Edinburgh. When I
+arrived at Edinburgh, I casually mentioned my trouble to a guard whom I
+had not seen before. He asked how the bags were marked, and then he said
+they had come with us. My porter had run with them to my train, but in
+despair of getting to my car with his burden, had put them into the
+last luggage-van, and all I had to do was now to identify them at my
+journey's end.
+
+Why one does not, guiltily or guiltlessly, claim other people's baggage,
+I do not know; but apparently it is not the custom. Perhaps in this, the
+deference for any one within his rights, peculiar to the faery dream,
+operates the security of the respective owners of baggage that could
+otherwise easily be the general prey. While I saw constant regard paid
+for personal rights, I saw only one case in which they were offensively
+asserted. This was in starting from York for London, when we attempted
+to take possession of a compartment we had paid for from the nearest
+junction, in order to make certain of it. We found it in the keeping
+of a gentleman who had turned it from a non-smoking into a smoking
+compartment, and bestrewn it with his cigar ashes. When told by the
+porters that we had engaged the compartment, he refused to stir, and
+said that he had paid for his seat, and he should not leave it till he
+was provided with another. In vain they besought him to consider our
+hard case, in being kept out of our own, and promised him another place
+as good as the one he held. He said that he would not believe it till he
+saw it, and as he would not go to see it, and it could not be brought to
+him, there appeared little chance of our getting rid of him. I thought
+it best to let him and the porters fight it out among themselves. When
+a force of guards appeared, they were equally ineffective against
+the intruder, who could not, or did not, say that he did not know the
+compartment was engaged. Suddenly, for no reason, except that he had
+sufficiently stood, or sat, upon his rights, he rose, and the others
+precipitated themselves upon his hand-baggage, mainly composed of
+fishing-tackle, such as a gentleman carries who has been asked to
+somebody's fishing, and bore it away to another part of the train. They
+left one piece behind, and the porter who came back for it was radiantly
+smiling, as if the struggle had been an agreeable exercise, and he spoke
+of his antagonist without the least exasperation; evidently, he regarded
+him as one who had justly defended himself from corporate aggression;
+his sympathies were with him rather than with us, perhaps because we had
+not so vigorously asserted ourselves.
+
+
+VI
+
+A case in which a personal wrong rather than a personal right was
+offensively asserted, was that of a lady, young and too fair to be so
+unfair, in a crowded train coming from the Doncaster Races to York. She
+had kept a whole first-class compartment to herself, putting her maid
+into the second-class adjoining, and heaping the vacant seats with her
+hand-baggage, which had also overflowed into the corridor. At the time
+the train started she was comforting herself in her luxurious solitude
+with a cup of tea, and she stood up, as if to keep other people out.
+But, after waiting, seven of us, in the corridor, until she should offer
+to admit us, we all swarmed in upon her, and made ourselves indignantly
+at home. When it came to that she offered no protest, but gathered up
+her belongings, and barricaded herself with them. Among the rest there
+was a typewriting-machine, but what manner of young lady she was, or
+whether of the journalistic or the theatrical tribe, has never revealed
+itself to this day. We could not believe that she was very high-born,
+not nearly so high, for instance, as the old lady who helped dispossess
+her, and who, when we ventured the hope that it would not rain on the
+morrow, which was to be St. Leger Day, almost lost the kindness for us
+inspired by some small service, because we had the bad taste to suggest
+such a possibility for so sacred a day.
+
+I never saw people standing in a train, except that once which I have
+already noted, when in a very crowded car in Wales, two women, decent
+elderly persons, got in and were suffered to remain on foot by the young
+men who had comfortable places; no one dreamed, apparently, of offering
+to give up his seat. But, on the other hand, a superior civilization
+is shown in what I may call the manual forbearance of the trolley and
+railway folk, who are so apt to nudge and punch you at home here, when
+they wish your attention. The like happened to me only once in England,
+and that was at Liverpool, where the tram conductor, who laid hands
+on me instead of speaking, had perhaps been corrupted by the unseen
+American influences of a port at which we arrive so abundantly and
+indiscriminately. I did not resent the touch, though it is what every
+one is expected to do, if aggrieved, and every one else does it in
+England. Within his rights, every one is safe; though there may be some
+who have no rights. If there were, I did not see them, and I suppose
+that, as an alien, I might have refused to stand up and uncover when the
+band began playing _God Save the King_, as it did at the end of every
+musical occasion; I might have urged that, being no subject of the King,
+I did not feel bound to join in the general prayer. But that would have
+been churlish, and, where every one had been so civil to me, I did not
+see why I should not be civil to the King, in a small matter. In the
+aggregate indeed, it is not a small matter, and I suppose that the
+stranger always finds the patriotism of a country molestive. Patriotism
+is, at any rate, very disagreeable, with the sole exception of our own,
+which we are constantly wishing to share with other people, especially
+with English people. We spare them none of it, even in their own
+country, and yet many of us object to theirs; I feel that I am myself
+being rather offensive about it, now, at this distance from them. Upon
+the whole, not caring very actively for us, one way or the other, they
+take it amiably; they try to get our point of view, and, as if it were a
+thorn, self-sacrificially press their bosoms against it, in the present
+or recent _entente cordiale_. None of their idiosyncrasies is more
+notable than their patience, their kindness with our divergence from
+them; but I am not sure that, having borne with us when we are by, they
+do not take it out of us when we are away.
+
+We are the poetry of a few, who, we like to think, have studied the
+most deeply into the causes of our being, or its excuses. But you cannot
+always be enjoying poetry, and I could well imagine that our lovers must
+sometimes prefer to shut the page. The common gentleness comes from the
+common indifference, and from something else that I will not directly
+touch upon. What is certain is that, with all manner of strangers,
+the English seem very gentle, when they meet in chance encounter. The
+average level of good manners is high. My experience was not the widest,
+and I am always owning it was not deep; but, such as it was, it brought
+me to the distasteful conviction that in England I did not see the
+mannerless uncouthness which I often see in America, not so often from
+high to low, or from old to young, but the reverse. There may be much
+more than we infer, at the moment, from the modulated voices, which
+sweetens casual intercourse, but there are certain terms of respect,
+almost unknown to us, which more obviously do that effect. It is a pity
+that democracy, being the fine thing it essentially is, should behave
+so rudely. Must we come to family government, in order to be filial or
+fraternal in our bearing with one another? Why should we be so blunt, so
+sharp, so ironical, so brutal in our kindness?
+
+
+VII
+
+The single-mindedness of the English is beautiful. It may not help to
+the instant understanding of our jokes; but then, even we are not always
+joking, and it does help to put us at rest and to make us feel safe. The
+Englishman may not always tell the truth, but he makes us feel that we
+are not so sincere as he; perhaps there are many sorts of sincerity. But
+there is something almost caressing in the kindly pause that precedes
+his perception of your meaning, and this is very pleasing after the
+sense of always having your hearer instantly onto you. When, by a chance
+indefinitely rarer than it is with us at home, one meets an Irishman in
+England, or better still an Irishwoman, there is an instant lift of the
+spirit; and, when one passes the Scotch border, there is so much lift
+that, on returning, one sinks back into the embrace of the English
+temperament, with a sigh for the comfort of its soft unhurried
+expectation that there is really something in what you say which, will
+be clear by-and-by.
+
+Having said so much as this in compliance with the frequent American
+pretence that the English are without humor, I wish to hedge in the
+interest of truth. They certainly are not so constantly joking as we; it
+does not apparently seem to them that fate can be propitiated by a habit
+of pleasantry, or that this is so merry a world that one need go about
+grinning in it. Perhaps the conditions with most of them are harder than
+the conditions with most of us. But, thinking of certain Englishmen
+I have known, I should be ashamed to join in the cry of those
+story-telling Americans whose jokes have sometimes fallen effectless.
+It is true that, wherever the Celt has leavened the doughier Anglo-Saxon
+lump, the expectation of a humorous sympathy is greater; but there are
+subtile spirits of Teutonic origin whose fineness we cannot deny, whose
+delicate gayety is of a sort which may well leave ours impeaching itself
+of a heavier and grosser fibre.
+
+No doubt you must sometimes, and possibly oftenest, go more than
+half-way for the response to your humorous intention. Those subtile
+spirits are shy, and may not offer it an effusive welcome. They are
+also of such an exquisite honesty that, if they do not think your wit
+is funny, they will not smile at it, and this may grieve some of our
+jokers. But, if you have something fine and good in you, you need not be
+afraid they will fail of it, and they will not be so long about finding
+it out as some travellers say. When it comes to the grace of the
+imaginative in your pleasantry, they will be even beforehand with you.
+But in their extreme of impersonality they will leave the initiative to
+you in the matter of humor as in others. They will no more seek out your
+peculiar humor than they will name you in speaking with you.
+
+
+VIII
+
+Nothing in England seeks you out, except the damp. Your impressions, you
+have to fight for them. What you see or hear seems of accident. The sort
+of people you have read of your whole life, and are most intimate with
+in fiction, you must surprise. They no more court observance than the
+birds in whose seasonable slaughter society from the King down delights.
+In fact, it is probable that, if you looked for both, you would find the
+gunner shyer than the gunned. The pheasant and the fox are bred to give
+pleasure by their chase; they are tenderly cared for and watched over
+and kept from harm at the hands of all who do not wish to kill them for
+the joy of killing, and they are not so elusive but they can be seen by
+easy chance. The pheasant especially has at times all but the boldness
+of the barnyard in his fearless port. Once from my passing train, I saw
+him standing in the middle of a ploughed field, erect, distinct, like
+a statue of himself, commemorative of the long ages in which his heroic
+death and martyr sufferance have formed the pride of princes and the
+peril of poachers. But I never once saw him shot, though almost as many
+gunners pursue him as there are pheasants in the land. This alone shows
+how shy the gunners are; and when once I saw the trail of a fox-hunt
+from the same coign of vantage without seeing the fox, I felt that I
+had almost indecently come upon the horse and hounds, and that the pink
+coats and the flowery spread of the dappled dogs over the field were
+mine by a kind of sneak as base as killing a fox to save my hens.
+
+
+IX
+
+Equally with the foxes and the pheasants, the royalties and nobilities
+abound in English novels, which really form the chief means of our
+acquaintance with English life; but the chances that reveal them to the
+average unintroduced, unpresented American are rarer. By these chances,
+I heard, out of the whole peerage, but one lord so addressed in public,
+and that was on a railroad platform where a porter was reassuring him
+about his luggage. Similarly, I once saw a lady of quality, a tall and
+girlish she, who stood beside her husband, absently rubbing with her
+glove the window of her motor, and whom but for the kind interest of our
+cabman we might never have known for a duchess. It is by their personal
+uninsistence largely, no doubt, that the monarchy and the aristocracy
+exist; the figures of the faery dream remain blent with the background,
+and appear from it only when required to lay cornerstones, or preside at
+races, or teas or bazars, or to represent the masses at home and abroad,
+and invisibly hold the viewless reins of government.
+
+Yet it must not be supposed that the commoner sort of dreamers are never
+jealous of these figments of their fancy. They are often so, and rouse
+themselves to self-assertion as frequently as our Better Element flings
+off the yoke of Tammany. At a fair, open to any who would pay, for
+some forgotten good object, such as is always engaging the energies
+of society, I saw moving among the paying guests the tall form of a
+nobleman who had somehow made himself so distasteful to his neighbors
+that they were not his friends, and regularly voted down his men,
+whether they stood for Parliament or County Council, and whether they
+were better than the popular choice or not. As a matter of fact, it was
+said that they were really better, but the people would not have them
+because they were his; and one of the theories of English manliness
+is that the constant pressure from above has toughened the spirit and
+enabled Englishmen to stand up stouter and straighter each in his place,
+just as it is contended elsewhere that the aesthetic qualities of the
+human race have been heightened by its stresses and deprivations in the
+struggle of life.
+
+For my own part, I believe neither the one theory nor the other. People
+are the worse for having people above them, and are the ruder and
+coarser for having to fight their way. If the triumph of social
+inequality is such that there are not four men in London who are not
+snobs, it cannot boast itself greater than the success of economic
+inequality with ourselves, among whom the fight for money has not
+produced of late a first-class poet, painter, or sculptor. The English,
+if they are now the manliest people under the sun, have to thank not
+their masters but themselves, and a nature originally so generous that
+no abuse could lastingly wrong it, no political absurdity spoil it. But
+if this nature had been left free from the beginning, we might see now a
+nation of Englishmen who, instead of being bound so hard and fast in
+the bonds of an imperial patriotism, would be the first in a world-wide
+altruism. Yet their patriotism is so devout that it may well pass itself
+off upon them for a religious emotion, instead of the superstition which
+seems to the stranger the implication of an England in the next world as
+well as in this.
+
+
+X
+
+We fancy that, because we have here an Episcopal Church, with its
+hierarchy, we have something equivalent to the English Church. But that
+is a mistake. The English Church is a part of the whole of English life,
+as the army or navy is; in English crowds, the national priest is not so
+frequent as the national soldier, but he is of as marked a quality, and
+as distinct from the civil world, in uniform, bearing, and aspect; in
+the cathedral towns, he and his like form a sort of spiritual garrison.
+At home here you may be ignorant of the feasts of the Episcopal Church
+without shame or inconvenience; but in England you had better be versed
+in the incidence of all the holy days if you would stand well with
+other men, and would know accurately when the changes in the railroad
+time-tables will take place. It will not do to have ascertained the
+limits of Lent; you must be up in the Michaelmases and Whitmondays,
+and the minor saints' days. When once you have mastered this
+difficult science, you will realize what a colossal transaction the
+disestablishment of the English Church in England would be, and how it
+would affect the whole social fabric.
+
+But, even when you have learned your lesson, it will not be to you as
+that knowledge which has been lived, and which has no more need ever
+to question itself than the habitual pronunciation of words. If one has
+moved in good English society, one has no need ever to ask how a word is
+pronounced, far less to go to the dictionary; one pronounces it as one
+has always heard it pronounced. The sense of this gives the American a
+sort of despair, like that of a German or French speaking foreigner, who
+perceives that he never will be able to speak English. The American is
+rather worse off, for he has to subdue an inward rebellion, and to form
+even the wish to pronounce some English words as the English do. He
+has, for example, always said "financier," with the accent on the last
+syllable; and if he has consulted his Webster he has found that there
+was no choice for him. Then, when he hears it pronounced at Oxford by
+the head of a college with the accent on the second syllable, and learns
+on asking that it is never otherwise accented in England, his head
+whirls a little, and he has a sick moment, in which he thinks he had
+better let the verb "to be" govern the accusative as the English do,
+and be done with it, or else telegraph for his passage home at once. Or
+stop! He must not "telegraph," he must "wire."
+
+
+XI
+
+As for that breathing in the wrong place which is known as dropping
+one's aitches, I found that in the long time between the first and last
+of my English sojourns, there had arisen the theory that it was a vice
+purely cockney in origin, and that it had grown upon the nation through
+the National Schools. It is grossly believed, or boldly pretended, that
+till the National School teachers had conformed to the London standard
+in their pronunciation the wrong breathing was almost unknown in
+England, but that now it was heard everywhere south of the Scottish
+border. Worse yet, the teachers in the National Schools had scattered
+far and wide that peculiar intonation, that droll slip or twist of the
+vowel sounds by which the cockney alone formerly proclaimed his low
+breeding, and the infection is now spread as far as popular learning.
+Like the wrong breathing, it is social death "to any he that utters it,"
+not indeed that swift extinction which follows having your name crossed
+by royalty from the list of guests at a house where royalty is about to
+visit, but a slow, insidious malady, which preys upon its victim, and
+finally destroys him after his life-long struggle to shake it off. It is
+even worse than the wrong breathing, and is destined to sweep the whole
+island, where you can nowhere, even now, be quite safe from hearing
+a woman call herself "a lydy." It may indeed be the contagion of the
+National School teacher, but I feel quite sure, from long observation of
+the wrong breathing, that the wrong breathing did not spread from London
+through the schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of
+the unbred in England as nasality is with us. Both infirmities are of
+national origin and extent, and both are individual or personal in their
+manifestation. That is, some Americans in every part of the Union talk
+through their noses; some Englishmen in every part of the kingdom drop
+their aitches.
+
+The English-speaking Welsh often drop their aitches, as the
+English-speaking French do, though the Scotch and Irish never drop them,
+any more than the Americans, or the English of the second generation
+among us; but the extremely interesting and great little people of Wales
+are otherwise as unlike the English as their mother-language is. They
+seem capable of doing anything but standing six feet in their stockings,
+which is such a very common achievement with the English, but that is
+the fault of nature which gave them dark complexions and the English
+fair. Where the work of the spirit comes in, it effects such a
+difference between the two peoples as lies between an Eisteddfod and a
+horse-race. While all the singers of Wales met in artistic emulation at
+their national musical festival at Rhyl, all the gamblers of England met
+in the national pastime of playing the horses at Doncaster. More money
+probably changed hands on the events at Doncaster than at Rhyl, and it
+was characteristic of the prevalent influence in the common civilization
+(if there is a civilization common to both races) that the King was at
+Doncaster and not at Rhyl. But I do not say this to his disadvantage,
+for I was myself at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. You cannot, unless
+you have a very practised ear, say which is the finer singer at an
+Eisteddfod, but almost any one can see which horse comes in first at a
+race.
+
+
+XII
+
+What is most striking in the mixture of strains in England is that it
+apparently has not ultimately mixed them; and perhaps after a thousand
+years the racial traits will be found marking Americans as persistently.
+We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be assimilating, the different
+voluntary and involuntary immigrations; but doubtless after two thousand
+years the African, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Gaul,
+the Hun, the Latin, the Slav will be found atavistically asserting his
+origin in certain of their common posterity. The Pennsylvania Germans
+have as stolidly maintained their identity for two centuries as the
+Welsh in Great Britain for twenty, or, so far as history knows, from
+the beginning of time. The prejudices of one British stock concerning
+another are as lively as ever, apparently, however the enmities may
+have worn themselves away. One need not record any of these English
+prejudices concerning the Scotch or Irish; they are too well known; but
+I may set down the opinion of a lively companion in a railroad journey
+that the Welsh are "the prize liars of the universe." He was an expert
+accountant by profession, and his affairs took him everywhere in the
+three Kingdoms, and this was his settled error; for the Welsh themselves
+know that, if they sometimes seem the prey of a lively imagination, it
+is the philologically noted fault of their language, which refuses to
+lend itself to the accurate expression of fact, but which would probably
+afford them terms for pronouncing the statement of my accountant
+inexact. He was perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions,
+for, though he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests,
+there were things that had never appealed to him. We praised together
+the lovely September landscape through which we were running, and I
+ventured some remark upon the large holdings of the land: a thing that
+always saddened me in the face of nature with the reflection that those
+who tilled the soil owned none of it; though I ought to have remembered
+the times when the soil owned them, and taken heart. My notion seemed to
+strike him for the first time, but he dismissed the fact as a necessary
+part of the English system; it had never occurred to him that there
+could be question of that system. There must be many Englishmen to whom
+it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet them you cannot blame
+the others.
+
+I fancied that one of the Englishmen to whom it might have occurred was
+he whom I met in Wales at Aberystwyth, where we spoke together a moment
+in the shadow of the co-educational University there, and who seemed at
+least of a different mind concerning the Welsh. "These Welsh farmers,"
+he said, "send their sons and daughters to college as if it were quite
+the natural thing to do. But just imagine a Dorsetshire peasant sending
+his boy to a University!"
+
+We suppose that the large holdings of land are the effect of wrongs and
+abuses now wholly in the past, and that the causes for their increase
+are no longer operative, but are something like those geological laws by
+which the strata under them formed themselves. Once, however, in driving
+through the most beautiful part of England, which I will not specify
+because every part of England is the most beautiful, I came upon an
+illustration of the reverse, as signal as the spectacle of a landslide.
+It was the accumulation, not merely within men's memories, but within
+the actual generation, of vast bodies of land in the hold of a great
+nobleman who had contrived a title in them by the simple device of
+enclosing the people's commons. It was a wrong, but there was no one of
+the wronged who was brave enough or rich enough to dispute it through
+the broken law, and no witness public-spirited enough to come to
+their aid. Such things make us think patiently, almost proudly, of
+our national foible of graft, which may really be of feudal origin.
+Doubtless the aggression was attacked in the press, but we all know
+what the attacks of the press amount to against the steadfast will of
+a powerful corporation, and a great nobleman in England is a powerful
+corporation. In this instance he had not apparently taken the people's
+land without some wish to make them a return for it. He had built a
+handsome road through their property, which he maintained in splendid
+condition, and he allowed them to drive over his road, and to walk
+freely in certain portions of their woods. He had also built a
+magnificent hospital for them, and it seemed rather hard, then, to
+hear that one of the humblest of them had been known to speak of him in
+whispered confidence as a "Upas tree."
+
+
+XIII
+
+Probably he was not personally a Upas tree, probably the rancor toward
+him left from being bawled after by one of his gatemen at a turning we
+had taken in his enclosure, "That's a private path!" was unjust. There
+was no sign, such as everywhere in England renders a place secure from
+intrusion. The word "Private" painted up anywhere does the effect of
+bolts and bars and of all obsolete man-traps beyond it, and is not for a
+moment that challenge to the wayfaring foot which it seems so often
+with us; but the warnings to the public which we make so mandatory, the
+English language with unfailing gentleness. You are not told to keep
+your foot or your wheel to a certain pathway; you are "requested,"
+and sometimes even "kindly requested"; I do not know but once I was
+"respectfully requested." Perhaps that nobleman's possession of these
+lands was so new that his retainers had to practise something of
+unwonted rudeness in keeping it wholly his where he chose. At any rate,
+the rule of civility is so universal that the politeness from class to
+class is, for what the stranger sees, all but unfailing. I dare say he
+does not see everything, even the Argus-eyed American, but apparently
+the manners of the lower class, where they have been touched by the
+upper, have been softened and polished to the same consistence
+and complexion. When it comes to the proffers, and refusals, and
+insistences, and acceptances between people of condition, such as I
+witnessed once in a crowded first-class carriage from London on an
+Oxford holiday, nothing could be more gently urgent, more beautifully
+forbearing. If the writers of our romantic novels could get just those
+manners into their fiction, I should not mind their dealing so much with
+the English nobility and gentry; for those who intend being our
+nobility and gentry, by-and-by, could not do better than study such
+high-breeding.
+
+If we approach the morals of either superiors or inferiors, we are in
+a region where it behooves us to tread carefully. To be honest, I know
+nothing about them, and I will not assume to know anything. I heard from
+authority which I could not suspect of posing for omniscience that the
+English rustics were apt to be very depraved, but they may on the
+other hand be saints for all that I can prove against them. They are
+superstitious, it is said, and there are few villages or old houses
+that have not their tutelary spectres. The belief in ghosts is almost
+universal among the people; as I may allow without superiority, for I
+do not know but I believe in them myself, and there are some million of
+American spiritualists who make an open profession of faith in them. It
+is said also that the poor in England are much spoiled by the constant
+aid given them in charity. This is supposed to corrupt them, and to
+make them dependent upon the favors of fortune, rather than the sweat of
+their brows. On the other hand, they often cannot get work, as I infer
+from the armies of the unemployed, and, in these cases, I cannot hold
+them greatly to blame if they bless their givers by their readiness
+to receive. If one may infer from the incessant beneficences, and the
+constant demands for more and more charities, one heaped upon another,
+there are more good objects in England than anywhere else under the sun,
+for one only gives to good objects, of course. The oppression of the
+subscriptions is tempered by the smallness of the sum which may satisfy
+them. "Five shillings is a subscription," said a friend who was accused
+of really always giving five pounds.
+
+
+XIV
+
+The English rich do not give so spectacularly as our rich do--that
+is, by handfuls of millions, but then the whole community gives more, I
+think, than our community does, and when it does not give, the necessary
+succor is taxed out of its incomes and legacies. I do not mean that
+there is no destitution, but only that the better off seem to have the
+worse off more universally and perpetually in mind than with us. All
+this is believed to be very demoralizing to the poor, and doubtless the
+certainty of soup and flannel is bad for the soul of an old woman whose
+body is doubled up with rheumatism. The Church seems to blame for
+much of the evil that ensues from giving something to people who have
+nothing; but I dare say the Dissenters are also guilty.
+
+Just how much is wanted to stay the stomach of a healthy pauper, it
+would be hard to say; but now and then the wayfarer gets some hint of
+the frequency if not the amount of feeding among the poor who are able
+to feed themselves. One day, in the outskirts--they were very tattered
+and draggled--of Liverpool, we stopped at a pastry-shop, where the kind
+woman "thought she could accommodate" us with a cup of tea, though she
+was terribly pressed with custom from all sorts of minute maids and
+small boys coming in for "penn'orths" of that frightful variety of tart
+and cake which dismays the beholder from innumerable shop windows
+in England. When we were brought our safer refection, we noted her
+activities to the hostess, and she said, "Yes, they all want a bit
+of cake with their tea, even the poorest"; and when we ventured our
+supposition that they made their afternoon tea the last meal of the day,
+she laughed at the notion. "Last meal! They have a good supper before
+they go to bed. Indeed, they all want their four meals a day."
+
+Another time, thriftily running in a third-class carriage from Crewe to
+Chester, I was joined by a friendly man who addressed me with the frank
+cordiality of the lower classes in recognizing one of their sort. "They
+don't know how to charge!" he said, with an irony that referred to the
+fourpence he had been obliged to pay for a cup of station tea; and when
+I tried to allege some mitigating facts in behalf of the company, he
+readily became autobiographical. The transition from tea to eating
+generally was easy, and he told me that he was a plumber, going to do a
+job of work at Llandudno, where he had to pay fourteen bob, which I
+knew to be shillings and mentally translated into $3.50, a week for
+his board. His wages were $1.50 a day, which the reader who multiplies
+fourpence by twenty, to make up the difference in money values, will
+find to be the wages of a good mechanic in the first Edward's time, five
+hundred years ago. On this he professed to live very well. He rose
+every morning at half-past four, and at six he had a breakfast of bread,
+butter, and coffee; at nine he had porridge and coffee; at one, he had
+soup, meat, and eggs, and perhaps beer; at night, after he got home from
+work, he had a stew and a bit of meat, and perhaps beer, with Mother. He
+thought that English people ate too much, generally, and especially
+on Sunday, when they had nothing else to do. Most men never came home
+without asking, "Well, Mother, what have you got for me to eat now?"
+When I remembered how sparely our farm people and mechanics fared, I
+thought that he was right, or they were wrong; for the puzzling fact
+remained that they looked gaunt and dyspeptic, and he hale and fresh,
+though the difference may have had as much to do with the air as the
+food. I liked him, and I cannot leave him without noting that he was of
+the lean-faced, slightly aquiline British type, with a light mustache;
+he was well dressed and well set up, and he spoke strongly, as North
+Britons do, with nothing of our people's husky whine. I found him on
+further acquaintance of anti-Chamberlain politics, pro-Boer as to
+the late war, and rather socialistic. He blamed the labor men for
+not choosing labor men to office instead of the gentry who offered
+themselves. He belonged to a plumbers' union, and he had nothing to
+complain of, but he inferred that the working-man was better off in
+America, from the fact that none of his friends who had gone to the
+States ever came home to stay, though they nearly all came home for
+a holiday, sooner or later. He differed from my other friend, the
+accountant, in being very fond of the Welsh; it must be owned their race
+seemed to have acquired merit with him through the tip of two sovereigns
+which his last employer in Llandudno had given him. On the other hand,
+he had no love for the Italians who were coming in, especially at
+Glasgow. In Glasgow, he said, there were more drunken women than
+anywhere else in the world, though there was no public-house drinking
+with them as in London. This, so far as I got at it, formed his outlook
+on life, but I dare say there was more of it.
+
+
+XV
+
+I was always regretting that I got at the people so little, and that
+only chance hints of what they were thinking and feeling reached me.
+Now and then, a native observer said something about them which
+seemed luminous. "We are frightfully feudal," such an observer said,
+"especially the poor." He did not think it a fault, I believe, and only
+used his adverb intensifyingly, for he was of a Tory mind. He meant the
+poor among the country people, who have at last mastered that principle
+of the feudal system which early enabled the great nobles to pay nothing
+for the benefits they enjoyed from it. But my other friend, the plumber,
+was not the least feudal, or not so feudal as many a lowly ward-heeler
+in New York, who helps to make up the muster of some captain of
+politics, under the lead of a common boss. The texture of society, in
+the smarter sense, the narrower sense, is what I could not venture to
+speak of more confidently. Once I asked a friend, a very dear and valued
+friend, whether a man's origin or occupation would make any difference
+in his social acceptance, if he were otherwise interesting and
+important. He seemed not to know what I would be at, and, when he
+understood, he responded with almost a shout of amazement, "Oh, not the
+least in the world!" But I have my doubts still; and I should say that
+it might be as difficult for a very cultivated and agreeable man servant
+to get on in London society, as for an artist or poet to feel at home
+in the first circles of New York. Possibly, however, London society,
+because of its almost immeasurable vastness, can take in more of more
+sorts of people, without the consciousness of differences which keeps
+our own first circles so elect. I venture, somewhat wildly, somewhat
+unwarrantably, the belief that English society is less sensitive to
+moral differences than ours, and that people with their little _taches_
+would find less anxiety in London than in New York lest they should come
+off on the people they rubbed against. Some Americans, who, even with
+our increasing prevalence of divorces, are not well seen at home, are
+cheerfully welcomed in England.
+
+Perhaps, there, all Americans, good and bad, high and low, coarse and
+fine, are the same to senses not accustomed to our varying textures
+and shades of color; that is a matter I should be glad to remand to the
+psychologist, who will have work enough to do if he comes to inquire
+into such mysteries. One can never be certain just how the English take
+us, or how much, or whether they take us at all. Oftenest I was inclined
+to think that we were imperceptible to them, or that, when we were
+perceptible, they were aware of us as Swedenborg says the most celestial
+angels are aware of evil spirits, merely as something angular. Americans
+were distressful to their consciousness, they did not know why; and
+then they tried to ignore us. But perhaps this is putting it a little
+fantastically. What I know is that one comes increasingly to reserve the
+fact of one's nationality, when it is not essential to the occasion, and
+to become as much as possible an unknown quality, rather than a quality
+aggressive or positive. Sometimes, when I could feel certain of my
+ground, I ventured my conviction that Englishmen were not so much
+interested in Americans as those Americans who stayed at home were apt
+to think; but when I once expressed this belief to a Unitarian minister,
+whom I met in the West of England, he received it with surprise and
+refusal. He said that in his own immediate circle, at least, his friends
+were interested and increasingly interested in America, what she was
+and what she meant to be, and still looked toward her for the lead
+in certain high things which Englishmen have ceased to expect of
+themselves. My impression is that most of the most forward of the
+English Sociologists regard America as a back number in those political
+economics which imply equality as well as liberty in the future. They do
+not see any difference between our conditions and theirs, as regards
+the man who works for his living with his hands, except that wages are
+higher with us, and that physically there is more elbow-room, though
+mentally and morally there is not. Save a little in my Unitarian
+minister, and this only conjecturally, I did not encounter that fine
+spirit which in Old England used to imagine the New World we have not
+quite turned out to be; but once I met an Englishman who had lived
+in Canada, and who, gentleman-bred as he was, looked back with fond
+homesickness to the woods where he had taken up land, and built himself
+a personable house, chiefly with his own hands. He had lived himself out
+of touch with his old English life in that new country, and had drawn
+breath in an opener and livelier air which filled his lungs as the home
+atmosphere never could again.
+
+
+XVI
+
+Yet he was standing stiffly up for himself, and strewing his
+convictions and opinions broadcast as the English all do when pressed
+by circumstance, while we, with none of their shyness, mostly think our
+thoughts to ourselves. I suppose we do it because we like better than
+they to seem of one effect with the rest of our kind. In England one
+sees a variety of dress in men which one rarely sees at home. They dress
+there not only in keeping with their work and their play, but in the
+indulgence of any freak of personal fancy, so that in the street of a
+provincial town, like Bath, for instance, you will encounter in a short
+walk a greater range of trousers, leggings, caps, hats, coats, jackets,
+collars, scarfs, boots and shoes, of tan and black, than you would meet
+at home in a month of Sundays. The differences do not go to the length
+of fashions, such as reduce our differences to uniformity, and clothe,
+say, our legs in knickerbockers till it is found everybody is wearing
+them, when immediately nobody wears them. Only ladies, of fashions
+beyond men's, gratify caprices like ours, and even these perhaps not
+voluntarily. In the obedience they show to the rule that they must never
+wear the same dinner or ball gown twice, it was said (but who can ever
+find out the truth of such things?) that they sometimes had sent home
+from the dressmaker's a number of dresses on liking, and wore them in
+succession, only to return them, all but one at least, as not liked, the
+dressmaker having found her account in her work being shown in society.
+
+[Illustration: AN ENGLISH HOUSEMAID]
+
+I do not know just what is to be inferred from a social fact or
+statement like this, but I may say that the devotion to an ideal of
+social position is far deeper with the English than with us. Whether
+we spend more or not, I believe that the English live much nearer their
+incomes than Americans do. I think that we save more out of our
+earnings than they out of theirs, and that in this we are more like the
+Continental peoples, the French or the Italians. They spend vastly more
+on state than we do, because, for one thing, they have more state to
+spend on. A man may continue to make money in America, and not change
+his manner of living till he chooses, and he may never change it. Such
+a thing could not happen to an Englishwoman as happened to the elderly
+American housewife who walked through the magnificent house which her
+husband had bought to surprise her, and sighed out at last, "Well, now I
+suppose I shall have to keep a girl!" The girl would have been kept
+from the beginning of her husband's prosperity, and multiplied, till
+the house was full of servants. If you have the means of a gentleman
+in England, you must live like a gentleman, apparently; you cannot live
+plainly, and put by, and largely you must trust to your life-insurance
+as the fortune you will leave your heirs. It cannot be denied that the
+more generous expenditure of the English adds to the grace of life, and
+that they are more hospitable according to their means than we are; or
+than those Continental peoples who are not hospitable at all.
+
+A thing that one feels more and more irritatingly in England is that,
+while with other foreigners we stand on common ground, where we may be
+as unlike them as we choose, with the English we always stand on English
+ground, where we can differ only at our peril, and to our disadvantage.
+A person speaking English and bearing an English name, had better be
+English, for if he cannot it shows, it proves, that there is something
+wrong in him. Our misfortune is that our tradition, and perhaps our
+inclination, obliges us to be un-English, whereas we do not trouble
+ourselves to be un-French, or un-Italian, for we are so by nature. The
+effort involved in distinguishing ourselves breeds a sort of annoyance,
+or call it no more than uneasiness, which is almost as bad as a bad
+conscience; and in our sense of hopeless perdition we turn vindictively
+upon our judge. But that is not fair and it is not wise; he does not
+mean to be our judge, except when he comes to us for the purpose; in his
+own house, he is civilly unaware of putting us to any test whatever. If
+you ask him whether he likes this thing or that of ours, he will tell
+you frankly; he never can see why he should not be frank; he has a kind
+of helplessness in always speaking the truth; and he does not try to
+make it palatable.
+
+
+XVII
+
+An English Radical, who would say of his King no more than that he was
+a good little man, and most useful in promoting friendship with France,
+was inclined to blame us because we did not stay by at the time of our
+Revolution, and help them fight out as Englishmen the fight for English
+freedom. He had none of the loyalty of sentiment which so mystifies the
+American, but plenty of the loyalty of reason, and expected a Utopia
+which should not be of political but of economical cast. But one was
+always coming upon illustrations of the loyalty of sentiment with
+which of course one could have no quarrel, for their patriotism seldom
+concerned us, except rather handsomely to include us. The French have
+ceased to be the hereditary enemy, and the Russians have now taken their
+place in the popular patriotism. I always talked with the lower classes
+when I could, perhaps because I felt myself near them in my unworthy
+way, and one evening in a grassy lane I made the acquaintance of a
+friendly man letting his horse browse the wayside turf. He was in the
+livery-stable line, but he had been a soldier many years. Upon this
+episode he became freely autobiographical, especially concerning his
+service in India. He volunteered the declaration that he had had enough
+of war, but he added, thoughtfully, "I should like to go out for a
+couple of years if there was any trouble with Russia."
+
+The love of England comes out charmingly in the swarming of English
+tourists in every part of their country. Americans may sometimes
+outnumber them at the Continental shrines, but we are in a pitiful
+minority at the memorable places in England; in fact, we are nowhere
+beside the natives. I liked their fondness for their own so much that
+I never could feel the fine scorn for "trippers" which I believe all
+persons of condition ought to assume. Even when the trippers did
+not seem very intelligently interested in what they saw, they were
+harmlessly employed, for a scene of beauty, or of historic appeal, could
+not be desecrated by the courtships which are constantly going on all
+over England, especially at the holiday seasons.
+
+The English are, indeed, great holiday-makers, even when past the age
+of putting their arms around one another's waists. The many and many
+seaside resorts form the place of their favorite outings, where they try
+to spend such days and weeks of the late summer as their savings will
+pay for. It is said that families in very humble station save the year
+round for these vacations, and, having put by twelve or fifteen pounds,
+repair to some such waterside as Blackpool, or its analogue in their
+neighborhood, and lavish them upon the brief joy of the time. They
+take the cheaper lodgings, and bring with them the less perishable
+provisions, and lead a life of resolute gayety on the sands and in the
+sea, and at the pier-ends where the negro minstrels and the Pierrots,
+who equally abound, make the afternoons and evenings a delight which no
+one would suspect from their faces to be the wild thing it is. If they
+go home at the end "high sorrowful and cloyed," there is no forecast of
+it in their demeanor, which is as little troubled as it is animated.
+The young people are even openly gay, and the robustness of their
+flirtations adds sensibly to the interest of the spectator. Our own
+public lovers seem of a humbler sort, and they mostly content themselves
+with the passive embraces of which every seat in our parks affords an
+example; but in England such lovers add playful struggles. A favorite
+pastime seemed to be for one of them to hold something in the hand, and
+for the other to try prying it open. When it was the young man who kept
+his hand shut, the struggle could go on almost indefinitely. I suppose
+it led to many engagements and marriages.
+
+When the young people were not walking up and down, or playfully
+scuffling, they were reading novels; in fact, I do not imagine that
+anywhere else in the world is there a half, or a tenth part, so much
+fiction consumed as in the English summer resorts. It is probably of the
+innutritious lightness of pop-corn; I had never the courage to look at
+the volumes which I could so easily have overlooked; but I am sure it
+was all out of the circulating library. As there were often several
+young women to one man, most of the girls had to content themselves
+with the flirtations in the books, where, I dare say, the heroines
+were always prying the heroes' hands open. On every seat one found them
+poring upon the glowing page, and met them in every walk with a volume
+under the arm, and another clasped to the heart. At places where the
+hand played, and they were ostensibly listening to the music, they were
+bowed upon their books, and the flutter of the turning leaves almost
+silenced the blare of the horns. By what inspiration they knew when _God
+Save the King_ was coming, and rose with a long sigh heaved in common,
+I should not be able to say. Perhaps they always reached the end of a
+story at the time the band came to that closing number, or perhaps they
+felt its imminence in their nerves. The fiction was not confined to the
+young girls, however. Both sexes and all ages partook of it; I saw as
+many old girls as young girls reading novels, and mothers of families
+were apparently as much addicted to the indulgence. I suppose they put
+by their books when they took tea, which is the other most noticeable
+dissipation in England. But I cannot enter upon that chapter; it is
+too large a theme; I will say, merely, that as the saloons are on Sixth
+Avenue, so the tearooms are in every part of the island.
+
+[Illustration: LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS]
+
+
+XVIII
+
+It had seemed to me in former visits to England that the Christian
+Sabbath was a more depressing day there than here, but from the last
+I have a more cheerful memory of it. I still felt it dispiriting in
+London, where as many fled from it as could, and where the empty streets
+symbolized a world abandoned to destruction; but this was mainly in the
+forenoon. Even then, the markets and fairs in the avenues given up to
+them were the scenes of an activity which was not without gayety, and
+certainly not without noise; and when the afternoon came, the lower
+classes, such as had remained in town, thronged to the public houses,
+and the upper classes to the evening parade in the Park. As to the
+relative amount of church-going, I will not even assume to be sure; but
+I have a fancy that it is a rite much less rigorous than it used to
+be. Still, in provincial places, I found the churches full on a Sunday
+morning, and all who could afford it hallowed the day by putting on
+a frock-coat and a top-hat, which are not worn outside of London on
+week-days. The women, of course, were always in their best on Sunday.
+Perhaps in the very country the upper classes go to church as much as
+formerly, but I have my doubts whether they feel so much obliged to it
+in conformity to usage, or for the sake of example to their inferiors.
+Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there are pretty
+well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive spectacle, and one
+could imagine people resorting to its functions for aesthetic reasons.
+
+But, in these guesses, one must remember that the English who remained
+at home were never Puritanized, never in such measure personally
+conscienced, as those who came to America in the times of the successive
+Protestant fervors; and that is a thing which we are apt to forget. The
+home-keeping English continued, with changes of ritual, much like the
+peoples who still acknowledged as their head "the Bishop of Rome."
+Their greater morality, if it was greater, was temperamental rather than
+spiritual, and, leaving the church to look after religion much more than
+our Puritans did, they kept a simplicity of nature impossible to the
+sectaries always taking stock of their souls. In fact, the Calvinists
+of New England were almost essentially different from the Calvinists of
+Holland, of France, even of Scotland. If our ancestors were the children
+of light, as they trusted, they were darkened by the forest, into which
+they plunged, to certain reasons which the children of darkness, as the
+Puritans believed the non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers
+from the world about them. There is no denying that with certain great
+gains, the American Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincialized,
+and that if they lived in the spirit, they lived in it narrowly, while
+the others, who lived in the body, lived in it liberally, or at any rate
+handsomely. From our narrowness we flattered ourselves that we were able
+to imagine a life more broadly based than theirs, or at least a life
+from which theirs must look insufficient and unfinal, so long as man
+feels within himself the prompting to be something better or higher than
+he is. Yet the English life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery
+dream of a king supported in his preeminence by a nobility, a nobility
+supported in turn by a commonalty, a commonalty supported again by a
+proletariat resting upon immeasurable ether; with a system of government
+kept, by assent so general that the dissent does not matter, in the
+hands of a few families reared, if not trained, to power; with a society
+so intimately and thoroughly self-acquainted that one touch of gossip
+makes its whole world kin, and responsive to a single emotion; with a
+charity so wisely studied, and so carefully applied, that restive misery
+never quite grows rebellious; with a patriotism so inborn and ingrained
+that all things English seem righteous because English; with a
+willingness to share the general well-being quite to the verge, but
+never beyond the verge, of public control of the administration--with
+all this, the thing must strike the unbelieving observer as desperately
+perfect. "They have got it down cold," he must say to himself, and
+confirm himself in his unfaith by reflecting that it is very cold.
+
+
+XIX
+
+The best observer of England that ever was, he whose book about the
+English makes all other comment seem idle and superfluous palaver, that
+Ralph Waldo Emerson whom we always find ahead of us when we look back
+for him, was once, as he relates in a closing chapter of English Traits,
+brought to bay by certain great English friends of his, who challenged
+him to say whether there really were any Americans with an American
+idea, and a theory of our future. "Thus challenged, I bethought myself
+neither of Congress, neither of President nor of Cabinet Ministers, nor
+of such as would make of America another Europe.... I opened the dogma
+of no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and
+the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, It is true that
+I have never yet seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand
+for this truth, and yet ... 'tis certain, as God liveth, the gun that
+does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect
+a clean revolution.... I insisted ... that the manifest absurdity of
+the view to English feasibility could make no difference to a gentleman;
+that as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and spinach in London
+or in Boston, the soul might quote Talleyrand, '_Messieurs, je n'en
+vois pas la n�cessit�_.'" In other words, Emerson laid before his
+great English friends a programme, as nearly as might then be, of
+philosophical anarchism, and naturally it met with no more acceptance
+than it would if now presented to the most respectable of his American
+readers. Yet it is never to be forgotten that it was the English who,
+with all their weight of feudal tradition, and amidst the nightmares to
+which their faery dream seemed so long subject, invented the only form
+of Democratic Christianity the world has yet known, unless indeed the
+German Mennonites are the same as the earlier English Quakers were in
+creed and life. In the pseudo-republic of the Cromwellian commonwealth
+the English had a state as wholly without liberty, equality, and
+fraternity as in the king-capped oligarchy they had before and have
+had ever since. We may be sure that they will never have such another
+commonwealth, or any resembling ours, which can no longer offer itself
+as an eminent example.
+
+The sort of Englishmen, of whose respect Americans can make surest are
+those English thick-and-thin patriots who admire force and strength, and
+believe that it is the Anglo-Saxon mission to possess the earth, and
+to profit by its weaker peoples, not cruelly, not unkindly, yet
+unquestionably. The Englishmen of whose disrespect we can make surest
+are those who expect to achieve liberty, equality, and fraternity in the
+economic way, the political way having failed; who do not care whether
+the head of the state is born or elected, is called "King" or called
+"President," since he will presently not be at all; who abhor war, and
+believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and these only if they
+work for a living. They have already had their will with the existing
+English state, until now that state is far more the servant of the
+people in fetching and carrying, in guarding them from hard masters
+and succoring them in their need, than the republic which professes
+to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. When one
+encounters this sort of Englishman, one thinks silently of the child
+labor in the South, of the monopolies in the North, of the companies
+which govern while they serve us, and one hopes that the Englishman is
+not silently thinking of them too. He is probably of the lower classes,
+and one consoles one's self as one can by holding one's head higher in
+better company, where, without secret self-contempt, one can be more
+openly proud of our increasing fortunes and our increasing territory,
+and our warlike adequacy to a first position among the nations of
+the world. There is no fear that in such company one's national
+susceptibilities will be wounded, or that one will not be almost as much
+admired for one's money as at home. I do not say quite, because there
+are still things in England even more admired than money. Certainly
+a very rich American would be considered in such English society,
+but certainly he would not be so much considered as an equally rich
+Englishman who was also a duke.
+
+I cannot name a nobleman of less rank, because I will not belittle my
+rich countryman, but perhaps the English would think differently, and
+would look upon him as lower than the latest peer or the newest knight
+of the King's creation. The King, who has no power, can do almost
+anything in England; and his touch, which is no longer sovereign for
+scrofula, can add dignity and give absolute standing to a man whose
+achievements merit it, but who with us would fail of anything like it.
+The English system is more logical than ours, but not so reasonable. The
+English have seen from the beginning inequality and the rule of the few.
+We can hardly prove that we see, in the future, equality and the rule
+of the many. Yet our vision is doubtless prophetic, whatever obliquities
+our frequent astigmatism may impart to it. Meantime, in its ampler range
+there is room for the play of any misgiving short of denial; but the
+English cannot doubt the justice of what they have seen without forming
+an eccentric relation to the actual fact. The Englishman who refuses the
+formal recognition of his distinction by his prince is the anomaly,
+not the Englishman who accepts it. Gladstone who declines a peerage is
+anomalous, not Tennyson who takes it. As part of the English system, as
+a true believer in the oligarchically administered monarchy, Gladstone
+was illogical, and Tennyson was logical.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Seven English Cities, by William Dean Howells
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+
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+   PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
+   "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd" >
+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
+    <title>
+      Seven English Cities, by W. D. Howells
+    </title>
+   <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    .side      { float: right; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
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+               text-indent: 0; font-weight: bold; font-style: italic;
+               font-weight: bold; color: black; background: #eeeeee; border: solid 1px;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Seven English Cities, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Seven English Cities
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7187]
+This file was first posted on March 24, 2003
+Last Updated: August 22, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tricia Gilbert, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, David Widger
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By W. D. Howells
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0011}.jpg" alt="{0011}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0011}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0010}.jpg" alt="{0010}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0010}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> NINE DAYS&rsquo; WONDER IN YORK </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> TWO YORKISH EPISODES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
+      </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_ILL" id="link2H_ILL"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ILLUSTRATIONS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> A VIEW OF MONK BAR <br /> ST. GEORGE&rsquo;S HALL, LIVERPOOL
+      <br /> THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL <br /> THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS <br />
+      MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL <br /> TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER <br /> THE MANCHESTER
+      SHIP-CANAL <br /> TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD <br /> YORK MINSTER&mdash;THE
+      GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND <br /> BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER <br /> WALMGATE
+      BAR HAS A BARBICAN <br /> ST. MARY&rsquo;S ABBEY <br /> CLIFFORD&rsquo;S
+      TOWER <br /> YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER <br /> DURHAM CATHEDRAL&mdash;NORTHWEST
+      VIEW <br /> FINCHALE PRIORY <br /> DURHAM CATHEDRAL&mdash;ITS MATCHLESS SEAT
+      ON THE BLUFFS OF THE RIVER <br /> THE &ldquo;STUMP&rdquo; OF ST. BOTOLPH&rsquo;S
+      CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY <br /> THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND
+      QUINCY MARKET-PLACES <br /> THE RIVER AT EVENING <br /> LIFTING ITS TOWER
+      FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM <br /> FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY <br />
+      THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH <br /> ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS <br />
+      LLANDUDNO&mdash;THE CITY AND HARBOR <br /> LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME&rsquo;S
+      NECK <br /> THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO <br /> CONWAY CASTLE <br /> PLAS MAWR
+      <br /> A PRESENTATION AT COURT <br /> THE ENGLISH HOUSEMAID <br /> LEADS A
+      LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS <br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Why should the proud stomach of American travel, much tossed in the
+      transatlantic voyage, so instantly have itself carried from Liverpool to
+      any point where trains will convey it? Liverpool is most worthy to be seen
+      and known, and no one who looks up from the bacon and eggs of his first
+      hotel breakfast after landing, and finds himself confronted by the
+      coal-smoked Greek architecture of St. George&rsquo;s Hall, can deny that
+      it is of a singularly noble presence. The city has moments of failing in
+      the promise of this classic edifice, but every now and then it reverts to
+      it, and reminds the traveller that he is in a great modern metropolis of
+      commerce by many other noble edifices.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Liverpool does not remind him of this so much as the good and true
+      Baedeker professes, in the dockside run on the overhead railway (as the
+      place unambitiously calls its elevated road); but then, as I noted in my
+      account of Southampton, docks have a fancy of taking themselves in, and
+      eluding the tourist eye, and even when they &ldquo;flank the Mersey for a
+      distance of 6-7 M.&rdquo; they do not respond to American curiosity so
+      frankly as could be wished. They are like other English things in that,
+      however, and it must be said for them that when apparent they are
+      sometimes unimpressive. From my own note-book, indeed, I find that I
+      pretended to think them &ldquo;wonderful and almost endless,&rdquo; and so
+      I dare say they are. But they formed only a very perfunctory interest of
+      our day at Liverpool, where we had come to meet, not to take, a steamer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our run from London, in the heart of June, was very quick and pleasant,
+      through a neat country and many tidy towns. In the meadows the elms seemed
+      to droop like our own rather than to hold themselves oakenly upright like
+      the English; the cattle stood about in the yellow buttercups, knee-deep,
+      white American daisies, and red clover, and among the sheep we had our
+      choice of shorn and unshorn; they were equally abundant. Some of the
+      blossomy May was left yet on the hawthorns, and over all the sky hovered,
+      with pale-white clouds in pale-blue spaces of air like an inverted lake of
+      bonnyclabber. We stopped the night at Chester, and the next evening, in
+      the full daylight of 7.40, we pushed on to Liverpool, over lovely levels,
+      with a ground swell like that of Kansas plains, under a sunset drying its
+      tears and at last radiantly smiling.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The hotel in Liverpool swarmed and buzzed with busy and murmurous American
+      arrivals. One could hardly get at the office window, on account of them,
+      to plead for a room. A dense group of our countrywomen were buying
+      picture-postals of the rather suave office-ladies, and helplessly fawning
+      on them in the inept confidences of American women with all persons in
+      official or servile attendance. &ldquo;Let me stay here,&rdquo; one of
+      them entreated, &ldquo;because there&rsquo;s such a draught at the other
+      window. May I?&rdquo; She was a gentle child of forty-five or fifty; and I
+      do not know whether she was allowed to stay in the sheltered nook or not,
+      tender creature. As she was in every one else&rsquo;s way there, possibly
+      she was harshly driven into the flaw at the other window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0021}.jpg" alt="{0021}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0021}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      The place was a little America which swelled into a larger with the
+      arrivals of the successive steamers, though the soft swift English trains
+      bore our co-nationals away as rapidly as they could. Many familiar accents
+      remained till the morning, and the breakfast-room was full of a nasal
+      resonance which would have made one at home anywhere in our East or West.
+      I, who was then vainly trying to be English, escaped to the congenial top
+      of the farthest bound tram, and flew, at the rate of four miles an hour,
+      to the uttermost suburbs of Liverpool, whither no rumor of my native
+      speech could penetrate. It was some balm to my wounded pride of country to
+      note how pale and small the average type of the local people was. The
+      poorer classes swarmed along a great part of the tram-line in side streets
+      of a hard, stony look, and what characterized itself to me as a sort of
+      iron squalor seemed to prevail. You cannot anywhere have great prosperity
+      without great adversity, just as you cannot have day without night, and
+      the more Liverpool evidently flourished the more it plainly languished. I
+      found no pleasure in the paradox, and I was not overjoyed by the
+      inevitable ugliness of the brick villas of the suburbs into which these
+      obdurate streets decayed. But then, after divers tram changes, came the
+      consolation of beautiful riverside beaches, thronged with people who
+      looked gay at that distance, and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills,
+      blue, blue.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we rejected
+      a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought it too thatched
+      and too cottage to be quite true (though I do not now say that there were
+      vermin in the straw roof), and accepted the hospitality of a pastry-cook&rsquo;s
+      shop. We felt the more at home with the kind woman who kept it because she
+      had a brother at Chicago in the employ of the Pinkerton Detective Agency,
+      and had once been in Stratford-on-Avon; this doubly satisfied us as
+      cultivated Americans. She had a Welsh name, and she testified to a great
+      prevalence of Welsh and Irish in the population of Liverpool; besides, she
+      sent us to a church of the Crusaders at Little Crosby, and it was no fault
+      of hers that we did not find it. We found one of the many old crosses for
+      which Little Crosby is named, and this was quite as much as we merited. It
+      stood at the intersection of the streets in what seemed the fragment of a
+      village, not yet lost in the vast maw of the city, and it calmed all the
+      simple neighborhood, so that we sat down at its foot and rested a long,
+      long minute till the tram came by and took us back into the loud, hard
+      heart of Liverpool.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not mean to blame it, for it was no louder or harder than the hearts
+      of other big towns, and it had some alleviation from the many young
+      couples who were out together half-holidaying in the unusually pleasant
+      Saturday weather. I wish their complexions had been better, but you cannot
+      have South-of-England color if you live as far north as Liverpool, and all
+      the world knows what the American color is. The young couples abounded in
+      the Gallery of Fine Arts, where they frankly looked at one another instead
+      of the pictures. The pictures might have been better, but then they might
+      have been worse (there being examples of Filippo Lippi, Memmi, Holbein,
+      and, above all, the <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i> of Rossetti); and in any
+      case those couples could come and see them when they were old men and
+      women; but now they had one another in a moment of half-holiday which
+      could not last forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the evening there were not so many lovers at the religious meetings
+      before the classic edifice opposite the hotel, where the devotions were
+      transacted with the help of a brass-band; but there were many youths
+      smoking short pipes, and flitting from one preacher to another, in the
+      half-dozen groups. Some preachers were nonconformist, but there was one
+      perspiring Anglican priest who labored earnestly with his hearers, and who
+      had more of his aspirates in the right place. Many of his hearers were in
+      the rags which seem a favorite wear in Liverpool, and I hope his words did
+      their poor hearts good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Slightly apart from the several congregations, I found myself with a
+      fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me in an accent so
+      unlike my own American that I ventured to answer him in Italian. He was
+      indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos Ayres and was
+      presently thinking of New York; and we had some friendly discourse
+      together concerning the English. His ideas of them were often so parallel
+      with my own that I hardly know how to say he thought them an improvident
+      people. I owned that they spent much more on state, or station, than the
+      Americans; but we neither had any censure for them otherwise. He was of
+      that philosophic mind which one is rather apt to encounter in the Latin
+      races, and I could well wish for his further acquaintance. His talk rapt
+      me to far other and earlier scenes, and I seemed to be conversing with him
+      under a Venetian heaven, among objects of art more convincing than the
+      equestrian statue of the late Queen, who had no special motive I could
+      think of for being shown to her rightly loving subjects on horseback. We
+      parted with the expressed hope of seeing each other again, and if this
+      should meet his eye and he can recall the pale young man, with the dark
+      full beard, who chatted with him between the pillars of the Piazzetta,
+      forty years before our actual encounter I would be glad of his address.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      How strange are the uses of travel! There was a time when the mention of
+      Liverpool would have conjured up for me nothing but the thought of
+      Hawthorne, who spent divers dull consular years there, and has left a
+      record of them which I had read, with the wish that it were cheerfuler.
+      Yet, now, here on the ground his feet might have trod, and in the very
+      smoke he breathed, I did not once think of him. I thought as little of
+      that poor Felicia Hemans, whose poetry filled my school-reading years with
+      the roar of the wintry sea breaking from the waveless Plymouth Bay on the
+      stern and rock-bound coast where the Pilgrim Fathers landed on a bowlder
+      measuring eight by ten feet, now fenced in against the predatory hammers
+      and chisels of reverent visitors. I knew that Gladstone was born at
+      Liverpool, but not Mrs. Oliphant, and the only literary shade I could
+      summon from a past vague enough to my ignorance was William Roscoe, whose
+      <i>Life of Leo X.</i>, in the Bohn Library, had been too much for my young
+      zeal when my zeal was still young. My other memories of Liverpool have
+      been acquired since my visit, and I now recur fondly to the picturesque
+      times when King John founded a castle there, to the prouder times when Sir
+      Francis Bacon represented it in Parliament; or again to the brave days
+      when it resisted Prince Rupert for three weeks, and the inglorious epoch
+      when the new city (it was then only some four or five hundred years old)
+      began to flourish on the trade in slaves with the colonies of the Spanish
+      Main, and on the conjoint and congenial traffic in rum, sugar, and
+      tobacco.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0027}.jpg" alt="{0027}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0027}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      It will be suspected from these reminiscences that I have been studying a
+      page of fine print in Baedeker, and I will not deceive the reader. It is
+      true; but it is also true that I had some wonder, altogether my own, that
+      so great a city should make so small an appeal to the imagination. In this
+      it outdoes almost any metropolis of our own. Even in journalism, an
+      intensely modern product, it does not excel; Manchester has its able and
+      well-written <i>Guardian</i>, but what has Liverpool? Glasgow has its
+      Glasgow School of Painting, but again what has Liverpool? It is said that
+      not above a million of its people live in it; all the rest, who can,
+      escape to Chester, where they perhaps vainly hope to escape the Americans.
+      There, intrenched in charming villas behind myrtle hedges, they measurably
+      do so; but Americans are very penetrating, and I would not be sure that
+      the thickest and highest hedge was invulnerable to them. As it is, they
+      probably constitute the best society of Liverpool, which the natives have
+      abandoned to them, though they do not constitute it permanently, but
+      consecutively. Every Cunarder, every White Star, pours out upon a city
+      abandoned by its own good society a flood of cultivated Americans, who
+      eddy into its hotels, and then rush out of them by every train within
+      twenty-four hours, and often within twenty-five minutes. They understand
+      that there are no objects of interest in Liverpool; and they are not met
+      at the Customs with invitations to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner from
+      the people of rank and fashion with whom they have come to associate.
+      These have their stately seats in the lovely neighboring country, but they
+      are not at the landing-stage, and even the uncultivated American cannot
+      stay for the vast bourgeoisie of which Liverpool, like the cities of his
+      own land, is composed. Our own cities have a social consciousness, and are
+      each sensible of being a centre, with a metropolitan destiny; but the
+      strange thing about Liverpool and the like English towns is that they are
+      without any social consciousness. Their meek millions are socially unborn;
+      they can come into the world only in London, and in their prenatal
+      obscurity they remain folded in a dreamless silence, while all the
+      commercial and industrial energies rage round them in a gigantic maturity.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of entry for our
+      human cargoes, indentured apprentices of the beautiful, the historical.
+      With the almost immediate transference of the original transatlantic
+      steamship interests from Bristol, Liverpool became the only place where
+      you could arrive. American lines, long erased from the seas, and the Inman
+      line, the Cunard line, the White Star line, and the rest, would land you
+      nowhere else. Then heretical steamers began to land you at Glasgow; worse
+      schismatics carried you to Southampton; there were heterodox craft that
+      touched at Plymouth, and now great swelling agnostics bring you to London
+      itself. Still, Liverpool remains the greatest port of entry for our
+      probationers, who are bound out to the hotels and railroad companies of
+      all Europe till they have morally paid back their fare. The superstition
+      that if you go in a Cunarder you can sleep on both ears is no longer so
+      exclusive as it once was; yet the Cunarder continues an ark of safety for
+      the timid and despairing, and the cooking is so much better than it used
+      to be that if in contravention of the old Cunard rule against a passenger&rsquo;s
+      being carried overboard you do go down, you may be reasonably sure of
+      having eaten something that the wallowing sea-monsters will like in you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0031}.jpg" alt="{0031}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0031}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      I have tried to give some notion of the fond behavior of the arriving
+      Americans in the hotels; no art can give the impression of their exceeding
+      multitude. Expresses, panting with as much impatience as the disciplined
+      English expresses ever suffer themselves to show, await them in the
+      stations, which are effectively parts of the great hotels, and whir away
+      to London with them as soon as they can drive up from the steamer; but
+      many remain to rest, to get the sea out of their heads and legs, and to
+      prepare their spirits for adjustment to the novel conditions. These the
+      successive trains carry into the heart of the land everywhere, these and
+      their baggage, to which they continue attached by their very
+      heart-strings, invisibly stretching from their first-class corridor
+      compartments to the different luggage-vans. I must say they have very
+      tenderly, very perfectly imagined us, all those hotel people and railroad
+      folk, and fold us, anxious and bewildered exiles, in a reassuring and
+      consoling embrace which leaves all their hands&mdash;they are Briarean&mdash;free
+      for the acceptance of our wide, wild tips. You may trust yourself
+      implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not trust the
+      head porter who tells you to take the London and Northwestern, for then
+      you will have to change four times on the way and at every junction
+      personally see that your baggage is unladen and started anew to its
+      destination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I will suppose the reader not to be going to Oxford, but, in compliance
+      with the scheme of this paper, to Manchester, where there is perhaps no
+      other reason for his going. He will there, for one thing, find the supreme
+      type of the railroad hotel which in England so promptly shelters and so
+      kindly soothes the fluttered exile. At Manchester, even more than at
+      Liverpool, we are imagined in the immense railroad station hotel, which is
+      indeed perhaps superorganized and over-convenienced after an American
+      ideal: one does not, for instance, desire a striking, or even a ticking,
+      clock in the transom above one&rsquo;s bedroom door; but the like type of
+      hotel is to be found at every great railroad centre or terminal in
+      England, and it is never to be found quite bad, though of course it is
+      sometimes better and sometimes worse. It is hard to know if it is more
+      hotel or more station; perhaps it is a mixture of each which defies
+      analysis; but in its well-studied composition you pass, as it were, from
+      your car to your room, as from one chamber to another. This is putting the
+      fact poetically; but, prosaically, the intervening steps are few at the
+      most; and when you have entered your room your train has ceased to be. The
+      simple miracle would be impossible in America, where our trains, when not
+      shrieking at the tops of their whistles, are backing and filling with a
+      wild clangor of their bells, and making a bedlam of their stations; but in
+      England they
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Come like shadows, so depart,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and make no sound within the vast caravansary where the enchanted
+      traveller has changed from them into a world of dreams.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      These hotels are, next to the cathedrals, perhaps the greatest wonder of
+      England, and in Manchester the railway hotel is in some ways more
+      wonderful than the cathedral, which is not so much planned on our native
+      methods. Yet this has the merit, if it is a merit, of antedating our
+      Discovery by nearly a century, and pre-historically it is indefinitely
+      older. My sole recorded impression of it is that I found it smelling
+      strongly of coal-gas, such as comes up the register when your furnace is
+      mismanaged; but that is not strange in such a manufacturing centre; and it
+      would be paltering with the truth not to own a general sense of the beauty
+      and grandeur in it which no English cathedral is without. The morning was
+      fitly dim and chill, and one could move about in the vague all the more
+      comfortably for the absence of that appeal of thronging monuments which
+      harasses and bewilders the visitor in other cathedrals; one could really
+      give one&rsquo;s self up to serious emotion, and not be sordidly and
+      rapaciously concerned with objects of interest. Manchester has been an
+      episcopal see only some fifty years; before that the cathedral was simply
+      T&rsquo; Owd Church, and in this character it is still venerable, and is
+      none the less so because of the statue of Oliver Cromwell which holds the
+      chief place in the open square before it. Call it an incongruity, if you
+      will, but that enemy of episcopacy is at least not accused of stabling his
+      horses in The Old Church at Manchester, or despoiling it of its sacred
+      images and stained glass, and he merits a monument there if anywhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0045}.jpg" alt="{0045}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0045}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      With the constantly passing trams which traverse the square, he is
+      undoubtedly more significant of modern Manchester than the episcopacy is,
+      and perhaps of that older Manchester which held for him against the king,
+      and that yet older Manchester of John Bradford, the first martyr of the
+      Reformation to suffer death at the stake in Smithfield. Of the still yet
+      older, far older Manchester, which trafficked with the Greeks of
+      Marseilles, and later passed under the yoke of Agricola and was a Roman
+      military station, and got the name of Maen-ceaster from the Saxons, and
+      was duly bedevilled by the Danes and mishandled by the Normans, there may
+      be traces in the temperament of the modern town which would escape even
+      the scrutiny of the hurried American. Such a compatriot was indeed much
+      more bent upon getting a pair of cotton socks, like those his own
+      continent wears almost universally in summer, but a series of exhaustive
+      visits to all the leading haberdashers in Manchester developed the strange
+      fact that there, in the world-heart of the cotton-spinning industry, there
+      was no such thing to be found. In Manchester there are only woollen socks,
+      heavier or lighter, to be bought, and the shopmen smile pityingly if you
+      say, in your strange madness, that woollen socks are not for summer wear.
+      Possibly, however, it was not summer in Manchester, and we were misled by
+      the almanac. Possibly we had been spoiled by three weeks of warm, sunny
+      rain on the Welsh coast, and imagined a vain thing in supposing that the
+      end of August was not the beginning of November.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I thought Manchester, however, as it shows itself in its public edifices,
+      a most dignified town, with as great beauty as could be expected of a
+      place which has always had so much to do besides looking after its figure
+      and complexion. The very charming series or system of parks, public
+      gardens, and playgrounds, unusual in their number and variety, had a
+      sympathetic allure in the gray, cool light, even to the spectator passing
+      in a hurried hansom. They have not the unity of the Boston or Chicago
+      parkways, and I will own that I had not come to Manchester for them. What
+      interested me more were the miles and miles of comfortable-looking little
+      brick houses in which, for all I knew, the mill-labor dwelt. Very possibly
+      it did not; the mills themselves are now nearly all, or mostly, outside of
+      Manchester, and perhaps for this reason I did not find the slums, when
+      shown them, very slummy, and I saw no such dreadful shapes of rags and
+      dirt as in Liverpool. We passed through a quarter of large, old-fashioned
+      mansions, as charming as they were unimagined of Manchester; but these
+      could not have been the dwellings of the mill-hands, any more than of the
+      mill-owners. The mill-owners, at least, live in suburban palaces and
+      villas, which I fancy by this time are not
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &mdash;&ldquo;pricking a cockney ear,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      as in the time of Tennyson&rsquo;s &ldquo;Maud.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What wild and whirling insolences, however, the people who have greatly
+      made the greatness of England have in all times suffered from their poets
+      and novelists, with few exceptions! One need not be a very blind devotee
+      of commercialism or industrialism to resent the affronts put upon them,
+      when one comes to the scenes of such mighty achievement as Liverpool, and
+      Manchester, and Sheffield; but how mildly they seem to have taken it all&mdash;with
+      what a meek subordination and sufferance! One asks one&rsquo;s self
+      whether the society of such places can be much inferior to that of
+      Pittsburg, or Chicago, or St. Louis, which, even from the literary attics
+      of New York, we should not exactly allow ourselves to spit upon.
+      Practically, I know nothing about society in Manchester, or rather, out of
+      it; and I can only say of the general type, of richer or poorer, as I saw
+      it in the streets, that it was uncommonly good. Not so many women as men
+      were abroad in such weather as we had, and I cannot be sure that the sex
+      shows there that superiority physically which it has long held morally
+      with us. One learns in the north not to look for the beautiful color of
+      the south and west; but in Manchester the average faces were intelligent
+      and the figures good.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      With such a journal as the Manchester <i>Guardian</i> still keeping its
+      high rank among English newspapers, there cannot be question of the
+      journalistic sort of thinking in the place. Of the sort that comes to its
+      effect in literature, such as, say, Mrs. Gaskell&rsquo;s novels, there may
+      also still be as much as ever; and I will not hazard my safe ignorance in
+      a perilous conjecture. I can only say that of the Unitarianism which
+      eventuated in that literature, I heard it had largely turned to
+      episcopacy, as Unitarianism has in our own Boston. I must not forget that
+      one of our religions, now a dying faith, was invented in Manchester by Ann
+      Lee, who brought, through the usual persecutions, Shakerism to such
+      spiritual importance as it has now lost in these States. Only those who
+      have known the Shakers, with their good lives and gentle ways, can regret
+      with me the decline of the celibate communism which their foundress
+      imagined in her marital relations with the Lancashire blacksmith she left
+      behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am reminded (or perhaps instructed) by Mr. Hope Moncrieff in Black&rsquo;s
+      excellent <i>Guide to Manchester</i> that before Mrs. Gaskell&rsquo;s
+      celebrity the fitful fame of De Quincey shed a backward gleam upon his
+      native place, which can still show the house where he was probably born
+      and the grammar-school he certainly ran away from. In my forgetfulness, or
+      my ignorance, that Manchester was the mother of this tricksy master-spirit
+      of English prose, who was an idol of my youth, I failed to visit either
+      house. The renown of Cobden and of Bright is precious to a larger world
+      than mine; and the name of the stalwart Quaker friend of man is dear to
+      every American who remembers the heroic part he played in our behalf
+      during our war for the Union. It is one of the amusing anomalies of the
+      British constitution, that the great city from whose political fame these
+      names are inseparable should have had no representation in Parliament from
+      Cromwell&rsquo;s time to Victoria&rsquo;s. Fancy Akron, Ohio, or Grand
+      Rapids, Michigan, without a member of Congress!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      {Illustration: TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER}
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;Manchester school&rdquo; of political economy has long since
+      passed into reproach if not obloquy with people for whom a byword is a
+      potent weapon, and perhaps the easiest they can handle, and I am not
+      myself so extreme a <i>laissez-faireist</i> as to have thought of that
+      school with pathos in the city of its origin; but I dare say it was a good
+      thing in its time. We are only now slowly learning how to apply the
+      opposite social principles in behalf of the Man rather than the Master,
+      and we have not yet surmounted all the difficulties or dangers of the
+      experiment. It is droll how, in a tolerably well-meaning world like this,
+      any sort of contempt becomes inclusive, and a whole population suffers for
+      the vice, or it may be the virtue, of a very small majority, or a very
+      powerful minority. Probably the most liberal and intelligent populations
+      of Great Britain are those of Manchester and Birmingham, names which have
+      stood for a hard and sordid industrialism, unrelieved by noble sympathies
+      and impulses. It is quite possible that a less generous spirit than mine
+      would have censured the &ldquo;Manchester school&rdquo; for the weather of
+      the place, and found in its cold gray light the effect of the Gradgrind
+      philosophy which once wrapt a world of fiction in gloom.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I can only be sure that the light, what little there was of it, was very
+      cold and gray, but it quite sufficed to show the huge lowries, as the
+      wagons are called, passing through the streets with the cotton fabrics of
+      the place in certain stages of manufacture: perhaps the raw, perhaps the
+      finished material. In Manchester itself one sees not much else of &ldquo;the
+      cotton-spinning chorus&rdquo; which has sent its name so far. The cotton
+      is now spun in ten or twenty towns in the nearer or farther neighborhood
+      of the great city, as every one but myself and some ninety millions of
+      other Americans well know. I had seen something of cotton-mills in our
+      Lowell, and I was eager, if not willing, to contrast them with the mills
+      of Manchester; but such of these as still remained there were, for my
+      luckless moment, inoperative. Personal influences brought me within one or
+      two days of their starting up; one almost started up during my brief stay;
+      but a great mill, employing perhaps a thousand hands, cannot start up for
+      the sake of the impression desired by the aesthetic visitor, and I had to
+      come away without mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had to come away without that personal acquaintance with the great
+      Manchester ship-canal which I almost equally desired. Coming or going, I
+      asked about it, and was told, looking for it from the car window, there,
+      <i>there</i> it was! but beyond a glimpse of something very long and very
+      straight marking the landscape with lines no more convincing than those
+      which science was once decided, and then undecided, to call canals on the
+      planet Mars, I had no sight of it. I do not say this was not my fault; and
+      I will not pretend that the canal, like the mills of Manchester, was not
+      running. I dare say I was not in the right hands, but this was not for
+      want of trying to get into them. In the local delusion that it was then
+      summer, those whose kindness might have befriended the ignorance of the
+      stranger were &ldquo;away on their holidays&rdquo;: that was exactly the
+      phrase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, by a smiling chance, I fell into the right hands and was borne to
+      the Cotton Exchange I did not fail of a due sense of the important scene,
+      I hope. The building itself, like the other public buildings of
+      Manchester, is most dignified, and the great hall of the exchange is very
+      noble. I would not, if I could, have repressed a thrill of pride in seeing
+      our national colors and emblems equalled with those of Great Britain at
+      one end of the room, but these were the only things American in the
+      impression left. We made our way through the momently thickening groups on
+      the floor, and in the guidance of a member of the exchange found a
+      favorable point of observation in the gallery. From this the vast space
+      below showed first a moving surface of hats, with few silk toppers among
+      them, but a multitude of panamas and other straws. The marketing was not
+      carried on with anything like the wild, rangy movement of our Stock
+      Exchange, and the floor sent up no such hell-roaring (there is no other
+      phrase for it) tumult as rises from the mad but not malign demons of that
+      most dramatic representation of perdition. The merchants, alike staid,
+      whether old or young, congregated in groups which, dealing in a common
+      type of goods, kept the same places till, toward three o&rsquo;clock, they
+      were lost in the mass which covered the floor. Even then there was no
+      uproar, no rush or push, no sharp cries or frenzied shouting; but from the
+      crowd, which was largely made up of elderly men, there rose a sort of
+      surd, rich hum, deepening ever, and never breaking into a shriek of
+      torment or derision. It was not histrionic, and yet for its commercial
+      importance it was one of the most moving spectacles which could offer
+      itself to the eye in the whole world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      {Illustration: THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL}
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot pretend to have profited by my visit to that immensely valuable
+      deposit of books, bought from the Spencer family at Althorp, and dedicated
+      as the Rylands library to the memory of a citizen of Manchester. Books in
+      a library, except you have time and free access to them, are as baffling
+      as so many bottles in a wine-cellar, which are not opened for you, and
+      which if they were would equally go to your head without final advantage.
+      I find, therefore, that my sole note upon the Rylands Library is the very
+      honest one that it smelt, like the cathedral, of coal-gas. The absence of
+      this gas was the least merit of the beautiful old Chetham College, with
+      its library dating from the seventeenth century, and claiming to have been
+      the first free library in England, and doubtless the world. In the
+      cloistered picturesqueness of the place, its mediaeval memorials, and its
+      ancient peace, I found myself again in those dear Middle Ages which are
+      nowhere quite wanting in England, and against which I rubbed off all
+      smirch of the modernity I had come to Manchester for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If I had waited a little till I had got into the beautiful Derbyshire
+      country which lies, or rather rolls, between Manchester and Sheffield, I
+      could as easily have got rid of my epoch in the smiling agricultural
+      landscape. I do not know just the measure of the Black Country in England,
+      or where Sheffield begins to be perhaps the blackest spot in it; but I am
+      sure that nothing not surgically clean could be whiter than the roads
+      that, almost as soon as we were free of Manchester, began to climb the
+      green, thickly wooded hills, and dip into the grassy and leafy valleys. In
+      the very heart of the loveliness we found Sheffield most nobly posed
+      against a lurid sunset, and clouding the sky, which can never be certain
+      of being blue, with the smoke of a thousand towering chimneys. From
+      whatever point you have it, the sight is most prodigious, but no doubt the
+      subjective sense of the great ducal mansions and estates which neighbor
+      the mirky metropolis of steel and iron has its part in heightening the
+      dramatic effect.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The English, with their love of brevity and simplicity, call these proud
+      seats the Dukeries, but our affair was not with them, and I shall not be
+      able to follow the footmen or butlers or housekeepers who would so
+      obligingly show them to the reader in my company. I had a fine
+      consciousness of passing some of them on my way into the town, and when
+      there of being, however, incongruously, in the midst of them. Worksop,
+      more properly than Sheffield, is the plebeian heart of these aristocratic
+      homes, or sojourns, which no better advised traveller, or less hurried,
+      will fail to see. But I was in Sheffield to see the capital of the Black
+      Country in its most characteristic aspects, and I thought it felicitously
+      in keeping, after I had dined (less well than I could have wished, at the
+      railway hotel which scarcely kept the promise made for it by other like
+      hotels) that I should be tempted beyond my strength to go and see that
+      colored opera which we had lately sent, after its signal success with us,
+      to an even greater prosperity in England. <i>In Dahomey</i> is a musical
+      drama not pitched in the highest key, but it is a genuine product of our
+      national life, and to witness its performance by the colored brethren who
+      invented it, and were giving it with great applause in an atmosphere quite
+      undarkened by our racial prejudices, was an experience which I would not
+      have missed for many Dukeries. The kindly house was not so suffocatingly
+      full that it could not find breath for cheers and laughter; but I proudly
+      felt that no one there could delight so intelligently as the sole
+      American, in the familiar Bowery figures, the blue policemen, the varying
+      darky types, which peopled a scene largely laid in Africa. The local New
+      York suggestions were often from Mr. Edward Harrigan, and all the more
+      genuine for that, but there was a final cake-walk which owed its
+      inspiration wholly to the genius of a race destined to greater triumphs in
+      music and art, and perhaps to a kindlier civilization than our ideals have
+      evolved in yet. It was pleasant to look upon those different shades of
+      color, from dead black to creamy blond, in their novel relief against an
+      air of ungrudging, of even respectful, appreciation, and I dare say the
+      poor things liked it for themselves as much as I liked it for them. At a
+      fine moment of the affair I was aware of a figure in evening dress,
+      standing near me, and regarding the stage with critical severity: a young
+      man, but shrewd and well in hand, who, as the unmistakable manager, was, I
+      hope, finally as well satisfied as the other spectators.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I myself came away entirely satisfied, indeed, but for the lasting pang I
+      inflicted upon myself by denying a penny to the ragged wretch who
+      superfluously opened the valves of my hansom for me. My explanation to my
+      soul was that I had no penny in my pocket, and that it would have been
+      folly little short of crime to give so needy a wretch sixpence. But would
+      it? Would it have corrupted him, since pauperize him further it could not?
+      I advise the reader who finds himself in the like case to give the
+      sixpence, and if he cares for the peace of my conscience, to make it a
+      shilling; or, come! a half-crown, if he wishes to be truly handsome. It is
+      astonishing how these regrets persist; but perhaps in this instance I owe
+      the permanence of my pang to those frequent appeals to one&rsquo;s pity
+      which repeated themselves in Sheffield. As I had noted at Liverpool I now
+      noted at Sheffield that you cannot have great prosperity without having
+      adversity, just as you cannot have heat without cold or day without dark.
+      The one substantiates and verifies the other; and I perceived that
+      wherever business throve it seemed to be at the cost of somebody; though
+      even when business pines it is apparently no better. The thing ought to be
+      looked into.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment of my visit to Sheffield, it happened that many works were
+      running half-time or no time, and many people were out of work. At one
+      place there was a little oblong building between branching streets, round
+      which sat a miserable company of Murchers, as I heard them called, on long
+      benches under the overhanging roof, who were too obviously, who were
+      almost offensively, out of work. Some were old and some young, some dull
+      and some fierce, some savage and some imbecile in their looks, and they
+      were all stained and greasy and dirty, and looked their apathy or their
+      grim despair. Even the men who were coming to or from their work at
+      dinner-time looked stunted and lean and pale, with no color of that south
+      of England bloom with which they might have favored a stranger. Slatternly
+      girls and women abounded, and little babies carried about by a little
+      larger babies, and of course kissed on their successive layers of dirt.
+      There were also many small boys who, I hope, were not so wicked as they
+      were ragged. At noon-time they hung much about the windows of cookshops
+      which one would think their sharp hunger would have pierced to the
+      steaming and smoking dishes within. The very morning after I had denied
+      that man a penny at the theatre door, and was still smarting to think I
+      had not given him sixpence, I saw a boy of ten, in the cut-down tatters of
+      a man, gloating upon a meat-pie which a cook had cruelly set behind the
+      pane in front of him. I took out the sixpence which I ought to have given
+      that poor man, and made it a shilling, and put it into the boy&rsquo;s
+      wonderfully dirty palm, and bade him go in and get the pie. He looked at
+      me, and he looked at the shilling, and then I suppose he did as he was
+      bid. But I ought to say, in justice to myself, that I never did anything
+      of the kind again as long as I remained in Sheffield. I felt that I owed a
+      duty to the place and must not go about corrupting the populace for my
+      selfish pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Between our hotel and the main part of the town there yawned a black
+      valley, rather nobly bridged, or viaducted, and beyond it in every
+      direction the chimneys of the many works thickened in the perspectives. It
+      was really like a dead forest, or like thick-set masts of shipping in a
+      thronged port; or the vents of tellurian fires, which send up their flames
+      by night and their smoke by day. It was splendid, it was magnificent, it
+      was insurpassably picturesque. People must have painted it often, but if
+      some bravest artist-soul would come, reverently, not patronizingly, and
+      portray the sight in its naked ugliness, he would create one of the most
+      beautiful masterpieces in the world. On our first morning the sun, when it
+      climbed to the upper heavens, found a little hole in the dun pall, and
+      shone down through it, and tried to pierce through the more immediate
+      cloud above the works; but it could not, and it ended by shutting the hole
+      under it, and disappearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond the foul avenues thridding the region of the works, and smelling of
+      the decay of market-houses, were fine streets of shops and churches, and I
+      dare say comely dwellings, with tram-cars ascending and descending their
+      hilly slopes. The stores I find noted as splendid, and in my pocket-book I
+      say that outside of the market-house, before you got to those streets,
+      there are doves and guinea-pigs as well as a raven for sale in cages; and
+      the usual horrible English display of flesh meats. The trams were one
+      story, like our trolleys, without roof-seats, and there were plenty of
+      them; but nothing could keep me, I suppose, till I had seen one of the
+      works. Each of these stands in a vast yard, or close, by itself, with many
+      buildings, and they are of all sorts; but I chose what I thought the most
+      typical, and overcame the reluctance of the manager to let me see it. He
+      said I had no idea what tricks were played by other makers to find out any
+      new processes and steal them; but this was after I had pleaded my innocent
+      trade of novelist, and assured him of my congenital incapability of
+      understanding, much less conveying from the premises, the image of the
+      simplest and oldest process. Then he gave me for guide an intelligent man
+      who was a penknife-maker by trade, but was presently out of work, and glad
+      to earn my fee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My guide proved a most decent, patient, and kindly person, and I hope it
+      is no betrayal of confidence to say that he told me the men in these
+      multitudinous shops work by the piece. The grinders furnish their
+      grindstones and all their tools for making the knives; there is no dry
+      grinding, such as used to fill the lungs of the grinders with deadly
+      particles of steel and stone, and bring them to an early death; but
+      sometimes a stone, which ordinarily lasts six months, will burst and drive
+      the grinder through the roof. The blade-makers do their own forging and
+      hammering, and it is from first to last apparently all hand-work. But it
+      is head-work and heart-work too, and the men who wrought at it wrought
+      with such intensity and constancy that they did not once look up or round
+      where we paused to look on. I was made to know that trade was dull and
+      work slack, and these fellows were lucky fellows to have anything to do.
+      Still I did not envy them; and I felt it a distinct relief to pass from
+      their shops into the cool, dim crypt which was filled with tusks of ivory,
+      in all sizes from those of the largest father elephant to those of the
+      babes of the herd; these were milk-tusks, I suppose. They get dearer as
+      the elephants get scarcer; and that must have been why I paid as much for
+      a penknife in the glittering showroom as it would have cost me in New
+      York, with the passage money and the duties added. Because of the price,
+      perhaps, I did not think of buying the two-thousand-bladed penknife I saw
+      there; but I could never have used all the blades, now that we no longer
+      make quill pens. I looked fondly at the maker&rsquo;s name on the knife I
+      did buy, and said that the table cutlery of a certain small household
+      which set itself up forty years ago had borne the same: but the pleasant
+      salesman did not seem to feel the pathos of the fact so much as I.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There is not only a vast deal of industry in Sheffield, but there is an
+      unusual abundance of history, as there might very well be in a place that
+      began life, in the usual English fashion, under the Britons and grew into
+      municipal consciousness in the fostering care of the Romans and the ruder
+      nurture of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Lords it had of the last, and
+      the great line of the Earls of Shrewsbury presently rose and led Sheffield
+      men back to battle in France, where the first earl fell on the bloody
+      field, and so many of the men died with him in 1453 that there was not a
+      house in all the region which did not mourn a loss. Which of the Roses
+      Sheffield held for, White or Red, I am not sure; but we will say that it
+      duly suffered for one or the other; and it is certain that the great
+      Cardinal Wolsey rested eighteen days at Sheffield Manor just before he
+      went to die at Leicester; and Mary Queen of Scots spent fourteen years of
+      sorrowful captivity, sometimes at the Manor and sometimes in Sheffield
+      Castle. This hold was taken by the Parliamentarians in the Civil War; but
+      the famous industries of the place had begun long before; so that Chaucer
+      could say of one of his pilgrims,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;A Sheffield thwytel bare he in his hose.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Thwytels, or whittles, figured in the broils and stage-plays of
+      Elizabethan times, and three gross of them were exported from Liverpool in
+      1589, when the Sheffield penknife was already famed the best in the world.
+      Manufactures flourished there apace when England turned to them from
+      agriculture, and Sheffield is now a city of four hundred thousand or more.
+      Apparently it has been growing radical, as the centres of prosperity and
+      adversity always do, and the days of the Chartist agitation continued
+      there for ten years, from 1839 till it came as near open rebellion as it
+      well could in a plot for an armed uprising. Then that cause of the people,
+      like many another, failed, and liberty there, as elsewhere in England, was
+      fain to
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;broaden slowly down
+     From precedent to precedent.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0063}.jpg" alt="{0063}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0063}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      Labor troubles, patient or violent, have followed, as labor troubles must,
+      but leisure has always been equal to their pacification, and now Sheffield
+      takes its adversity almost as quietly as its prosperity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We were not there, though, for others&rsquo; labor or leisure, which we
+      have plenty of at home; but even before I appeased such conscience as I
+      had about seeing a type of the works, we went a long drive up out of the
+      town to that Manor where the poor, brilliant, baddish Scotch queen was
+      imprisoned by her brilliant, baddish English cousin. In any question of
+      goodness, there was little to choose between them; both were blood-stained
+      liars; but it is difficult being a good woman and a queen too, and they
+      only failed where few have triumphed. Mary is the more appealing to the
+      fancy because she suffered beyond her deserts, but Elizabeth was to be
+      pitied because Mary had made it politically imperative for her to kill
+      her. All this we had threshed out many times before, and had said that,
+      cat for cat, Mary was the more dangerous because she was the more
+      feminine, and Elizabeth the more detestable because she was the more
+      masculine in her ferocity. We were therefore in the right mood to visit
+      Mary&rsquo;s prison, and we were both indignant and dismayed to find that
+      our driver, called from a mews at a special price set upon his
+      intelligence, had never heard of it and did not know where it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We reported his inability to the head porter, who came out of the hotel in
+      a fine flare of sarcasm. &ldquo;You call yourself a Sheffield man and not
+      know where the Old Manor is!&rdquo; he began, and presently reduced that
+      proud ignoramus of a driver to such a willingness to learn that we thought
+      it at least safe to set out with him, and so started for the long climb up
+      the hills that hold Sheffield in their hollow. When we reached their
+      crest, we looked down and back through the clearer air upon as strange and
+      grand a sight as could be. It was as if we were looking into the crater of
+      a volcano, which was sending up its smoke through a thousand vents. All
+      detail of the works and their chimneys was lost in the retrospect; one was
+      aware only of a sort of sea of vapor through which they loomed and
+      gloomed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our ascent was mostly through winding and climbing streets of little dirty
+      houses, with frowsy gardens beside them, and the very dirtiest-faced
+      children in England playing about them. From time to time our driver had
+      to ask his way of the friendly flat-bosomed slatterns, with babies in
+      their arms, on their thresholds, or the women tending shop, or peddling
+      provisions, who were all kind to him, and assured him with varying degrees
+      of confidence that the Old Manor was a bit, or a goodish bit, beyond. All
+      at once we came upon the sight of it on an open top, hard by what is left
+      of the ruins of the real Manor, where Wolsey stayed that little while from
+      death. The relics are broken walls, higher here, lower there; with some
+      Tudor fireplaces showing through their hollow windows. What we saw in
+      tolerable repair was the tower of the Manor, or the lodge, and we drove to
+      it across a field, on a track made by farm carts, and presently kept by a
+      dog that showed his teeth in a grin not wholly of amusement at our
+      temerity. While we debated whether we had not better let the driver get
+      down and knock, a farmer-like man came to the door and called the dog off.
+      Then, in a rich North Country accent, he welcomed us to his kitchen
+      parlor, where his wife was peeling potatoes for their midday dinner, and
+      so led us up the narrow stone stairs of the tower to the chambers where
+      Mary miserably passed those many long years of captivity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rooms were visibly restored in every point where they could have
+      needed restoration, but they were not ruthlessly or too insistently
+      restored. There was even an antique chair, but when our guide was put on
+      his honor as to whether it was one of the original chairs he answered,
+      &ldquo;Well, if people wanted a chair!&rdquo; He was a rather charmingly
+      quaint, humorous person, with that queer conscience, and he did not
+      pretend to be moved by the hard inexorable stoniness of the place which
+      had been a queen&rsquo;s prison for many years. One must not judge it too
+      severely, though: bowers and prisons of that day looked much alike, and
+      Mary Stuart may have felt this a bower, and only hated it because she
+      could not get out of it, or anyhow break the relentless hold of that Earl
+      and Countess of Shrewsbury whose captive guest she was, though she never
+      ceased trying. We went up on the wide flat roof, of lead or stone, whither
+      her feet must have so often heavily climbed, and looked out over the
+      lovely landscape which she must have abhorred; and the wind that blew over
+      it, in late August, was very cold; far colder than the air of the prison,
+      or the bower, below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The place belongs now to the Duke of Norfolk, the great Catholic duke, and
+      owes its restoration to his pity and his piety. Our farmer guide was
+      himself a Protestant, but he spoke well of the duke, with whom he reported
+      himself in such colloquies as, &ldquo;I says to Dook,&rdquo; and, &ldquo;Dook
+      says to me.&rdquo; When he understood that we were Americans he asked
+      after a son of his who had gone out to our continent twenty years before.
+      He had only heard from him once, and that on the occasion of his being
+      robbed of all his money by a roommate. It was in a place called Massatusy;
+      we suggested Massachusetts, and he assented that such might be the place;
+      and Mary&rsquo;s prison-house acquired an added pathos.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We drove back through the beautiful park, the Duke of Norfolk&rsquo;s gift
+      to Sheffield, which is plentifully provided, like all English towns, with
+      public pleasure-grounds. They lie rather outside of it, but within it are
+      many and many religious and civic edifices which merit to be seen. We
+      chose as chiefest the ancient Parish Church, of Norman origin and modern
+      restoration, where we visited the tomb of the Lord and Lady Shrewsbury who
+      were Mary Stuart&rsquo;s jailers; or if they were not, a pair of their
+      family were, and it comes to the same thing, emotionally. The chapel in
+      which they lie is most beautiful, and the verger had just brushed the
+      carpet within the chancel to such immaculate dustlessness that he could
+      not bring himself to let us walk over it. He let us walk round it, and we
+      saw the chapel as a favor, which we discharged with an abnormal tip after
+      severe debate whether a person of this verger&rsquo;s rich respectability
+      and perfect manner would take any tip at all. In the event it appeared
+      that he would.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      NINE DAYS&rsquo; WONDER IN YORK
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps it would be better to come to York somewhat earlier in the year
+      than the 2d of September. By that time the English summer has suffered
+      often if not severe discouragements. It has really only two months out of
+      the year to itself, and even July and August are not always constant to
+      it. To be sure, their defection cannot spoil it, but they dispose it to
+      the slights of September in a dejection from which there is no rise to
+      those coquetries with October known to our own summer. Yet, having said so
+      much, I feel bound to add that our nine days in York, from the 2d to the
+      12th of September, were more summer than autumn days, some wholly, some
+      partly, with hours of sunshine keeping the flowers bright which the rain
+      kept fresh. If you walked fast in this sunshine you were quite hot, and
+      sometimes in the rain you were uncomfortably warm, or at least you were
+      wet. If the mornings demanded a fire in the grate, the evenings were so
+      clement that the lamp was sufficient, and the noons were very well with
+      neither.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The day of our arrival in York began bright at Sheffield, where there was
+      a man quarrelling so loudly and aimlessly in the station that we were glad
+      to get away from him, as well as from the mountains of slag surrounding
+      the iron metropolis. The train ran through a pass in these, and then we
+      found ourselves in a plain country, and, though the day turned gray and
+      misty, there seemed a sort of stored sunshine in the fields of wheat which
+      the farmers were harvesting far and near. One has heard so much of the
+      decay of the English agriculture that one sees what is apparently the
+      contrary with nothing less than astonishment. The acreage of these
+      wheat-fields was large, and the yield heavier than I could remember to
+      have seen at home. Where the crop had been got in, much ploughing for the
+      next year had been done already, and where the ploughing was finished the
+      work of sowing by drill was going steadily forward, in the faith that such
+      an unprecedented summer as was now passing would return another year. At
+      all these pleasant labors, of course, the rooks were helping, or at least
+      bossing.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We expected to stay certainly a week, and perhaps two weeks, in York, and
+      our luck with railway hotels had been so smiling elsewhere that we had no
+      other mind than to spend the time at the house into which we all but
+      stepped from our train. But we had reckoned without our host, as he was
+      represented by one of a half-dozen alert young ladies in the office, who
+      asked how long we expected to stay, and when we expressed a general
+      purpose of staying indefinitely, said that all her rooms were taken from
+      the next Monday by people who had engaged them long before for the races.
+      I did not choose to betray my ignorance to a woman, but I privately asked
+      the head porter what races those were which were limiting our proposed
+      sojourn, and I am now afraid he had some difficulty in keeping a head
+      porter&rsquo;s conventional respect for a formal superior in answering
+      that we had arrived on the eve of Doncaster Week. Then I said, &ldquo;Oh
+      yes,&rdquo; and affected the knowledge of Doncaster Week which I resolved
+      to acquire by staying somewhere in York till it was over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as yet, that Friday afternoon, there was no hurry, and, instead of
+      setting about a search for lodgings at once, we drove up into the town, as
+      soon as we had tea, and visited York Minster while it was still the gray
+      afternoon and not yet the gray evening. I thought the hour fortunate, and
+      I do not see yet how we could have chosen a better hour out of the whole
+      twenty-four, for the inside or the outside of the glorious fane, the
+      grandest and beautifulest in all England, as I felt then and I feel now.
+      If I were put to the question and were forced to say in what its supreme
+      grandeur and beauty lay, I should perhaps say in its most ample
+      simplicity. No doubt it is full of detail, but I keep no sense of this
+      from that mighty interior, with its tree-like, clustered pillars, and its
+      measureless windows, like breadths of stained foliage in autumnal
+      woodlands. You want the scale of nature for the Minster at York, and I
+      cannot liken it to less than all-out-doors. Some cathedrals, like that of
+      Wells, make you think of gardens; but York Minster will not be satisfied
+      with less than an autumnal woodland, where the trees stand in clumps, with
+      grassy levels about them, and with spacious openings to the sky, that let
+      in the colored evening light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You could not get lost in it, for it was so free of all such architectural
+      undergrowth as cumbers the perspectives of some cathedrals; besides, the
+      afternoon of our visit there were so many other Americans that you could
+      easily have asked your way in your own dialect. We loitered over its
+      lengths and breadths, and wondered at its windows, which were like the
+      gates of sunrise and sunset for magnitude, and lingered in a sumptuous
+      delay from going into the choir, delighting in the gray twilight which
+      seemed to gather from the gray walls inward, when suddenly what seemed a
+      metallic curtain was dropped with a clash and the simultaneous up-flashing
+      of electric bulbs inside it, and we were shut out from the sight but not
+      the sound of the service that began in the choir. We could not wholly
+      regret the incident, for as we recalled the like operation of religion in
+      churches of our Italian travel, we were reminded how equally authoritative
+      the Church of England and the Church of Home were, and how little they
+      adjust their ceremonial to the individual, how largely to the collective
+      worshipper. You could come into the Minster of York as into the basilica
+      of St. Mark at Venice for a silent prayer amid the religious influences of
+      the place, and be conscious of your oneness with your Source, as if there
+      were no other one; but when the priesthood called you as one of many to
+      your devotions, it was with the same imperative voice in both, and you
+      must obey or be cut off from your chance. I suppose it is right; but
+      somehow the down-clashing of that screen of the choir in the Minster at
+      York seemed to exclude us with reproach, almost with ignominy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0075}.jpg" alt="{0075}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0075}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      We did what we could to repair our wounded self respect, and did not lay
+      our exclusion up against the Minster itself, which I find that I noted as
+      &ldquo;scatteringly noble outside.&rdquo; By this I dare say I meant it
+      had not that artistic unity of which I brought the impression from the
+      inside. They were doing, as they were always doing, every where, with
+      English cathedrals, something to one of the towers; but this only enhanced
+      its scattering nobleness, for it left that greatly bescaffolded tower
+      largely to the imagination, in which it soared sublimer, if anything, than
+      its compeer. Most of the streets leading to and from the rather
+      insufficient, irregular square where the Minster stands are lanes of
+      little houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth, centuries, which
+      collectively curved in their line, and not only overhung at their second
+      stories, but bulged outward involuntarily from the weakness of age. They
+      were all quite habitable, and some much later dwellings immediately
+      surrounding the church were the favorite sojourn, apparently, of such
+      strangers as could have rooms at the hotels only until the Monday of
+      Doncaster Week.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      During those limited days of the week before Doncaster, I was constantly
+      coming back to the Minster, which is not the germ of political York, or
+      hardly religious York; the brave city was a Romano-British capital and a
+      Romano-British episcopal see centuries before the first wooden temple was
+      built on the site of the present edifice in 627. I should like to make
+      believe that we found traces of that simple church in the crypt of the
+      Minster when we went the next morning and were herded through it by the
+      tenderest of vergers. Most of our flock were Americans, and we put our
+      guide to such question in matters of imagination and information as the
+      patience of a less amiable shepherd would not have borne. Many a tale,
+      true or o&rsquo;ertrue, our verger had, which he told with unction; when
+      he ascended with us to the body of the church, and said that the stained
+      glass of the gigantic windows suffered from the depredations of the
+      mistaken birds which pecked holes in the joints of their panes, I felt
+      that I had full measure from him, pressed down and running over. I do not
+      remember why he said the birds should have done this, but it seems
+      probable that they took the mellow colors of the glass for those of ripe
+      fruits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For myself, I could not get enough of those windows, in another sort of
+      famine which ought at this time to have been sated. I was forever
+      wondering at their grandeur outside and their glory inside. I was glad to
+      lose my way about the town, for if I kept walking I was sure, sooner or
+      later, to bring up at the Minster; but the last evening of our stay I made
+      a purposed pilgrimage to it for a final emotion. It was the clearest
+      evening we had in York, and at half-past six the sun was setting in a
+      transparent sky, which somehow it did not flush with any of those glaring
+      reds which the vulgarer sorts of sunsets are fond of, but bathed the air
+      in a delicate suffusion of daffodil light, just tinged with violet. This
+      was the best medium to see the past of the Minster in, and I can see it
+      there now, if I did not then. I followed, or I follow, its veracious
+      history back to the beginning of the seventh century, whence you can look
+      back further still to the earliest Christian temples where the Romans
+      worshipped with the Britons, whom they had enslaved and converted. But it
+      was not till 627 that the little wooden chapel was built on the site of
+      the Minster, to house the rite of the Northumbrian King Eadwine&rsquo;s
+      baptism. He felt so happy in his new faith that he replaced the wooden
+      structure with stone. In the next century it was burned, but rebuilt by
+      another pious prince, and probably repaired by yet another after the Danes
+      took the city a hundred years later. It was then in a good state to be
+      destroyed by that devout William the Conqueror, who came to take the Saxon
+      world in its sins of guttling and guzzling. The first Norman archbishop
+      reconstructed or restored the church, and then it began to rise and to
+      spread in glory&mdash;nave, transepts, and choir, and pillars and towers,
+      Norman and Early English, and Perpendicular and Decorated&mdash;till it
+      found itself at last what the American tourist sees it to-day. It suffered
+      from two great fires in the nineteenth century, the first set by a lunatic
+      who had the fancy of seeing it burn, but who had only the satisfaction of
+      destroying part of the roof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was never richly painted, but the color wanting in the walls and
+      fretted vault was more than compensated by the mellowed splendors of the
+      matchless windows. It was, indeed, fit to be the home of much more secular
+      history than can be associated with it; but not till the end of the
+      thirteenth century had the Minster a patron of its own, when St. William
+      was canonized, and exercised his office, whatever it was, for two brief
+      centuries. Then the Cromwell of Henry VIII. took possession of it in
+      behalf of the crown, and the saint&rsquo;s charge was practically
+      abolished. He was even deprived of his head, for the relic was encased in
+      gold and jewels, and was therefore worth the king&rsquo;s having, who was
+      most a friend of the reformed religion when it paid best. The later
+      Cromwell, who beat a later king hard by at Marston Moor, must have somehow
+      desecrated the Minster, though there is no record of any such fact. A more
+      authentic monument of the religious difficulties of the times is the
+      pastoral staff, bearing the arms of Catharine of Braganza, the poor little
+      wife of Charles II., which was snatched from a Roman Catholic bishop when,
+      to the high offence of Protestant piety, he was heading a procession in
+      York in 1688. The verger showing us through the Minster was a good
+      Protestant, but he held it bad taste in a predecessor of his, who when
+      leading about a Catholic party of sight-seers took the captive staff from
+      its place and shook it in their faces, saying, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you wish
+      you had it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There is no telling to what lengths true religion, may rightly not go. I
+      rather prize the incident as the sole fact concerning the Minster which I
+      could make sure of even after repeated visits, and if I am indebted for my
+      associations with it, long after the event, to Dr. Raine&rsquo;s scholarly
+      and interesting sketch of York history, there is no reason why the
+      better-informed reader should not accompany me in my last visit fully
+      equipped. I walked slowly all round the structure, and fancied that I got
+      a new sense of grandeur in the effect of the east window, which was, at
+      any rate, more impressive than the north window. It was a long walk,
+      almost the measure of such a walk as one should take after supper for one&rsquo;s
+      health, and it had such incidents as many pauses for staring up at the
+      many restorations going on. From point to point the incomparable
+      Perpendicular Gothic carried the eye to the old gargoyles of the caves and
+      towers waiting to be replaced by the new gargoyles, which lay in
+      open-mouthed grimacing in the grass at the bases of the church. While I
+      stood noting both, and thinking the chances were that I should never look
+      on York Minster again, and feeling the luxurious pang of it, a verger in a
+      skull-cap was so good as to come to a side door and parley long and
+      pleasantly with a policeman. The simple local life went on around; people
+      going to or from supper passed me; kind, vulgar noises came from the
+      little houses bulging over the narrow, neighboring streets; there seemed
+      to be the stamping of horses in a stable, and there was certainly the
+      misaspirated talk about them. I could not have asked better material for
+      the humble emotions I love; and I was more than content on my way home to
+      find myself one of the congregation at the loud devotions of a detachment
+      of the Salvation Army. After a battering of drums and a clashing of
+      cymbals and a shouting of hymns, the worship settled to the prayer of a
+      weak brother, who was so long in supplication that the head exhorter
+      covered a yawn with his hand, and at the first sign of relenting in the
+      supplicant bade the drums and cymbals strike up. Then, after a hymn, a
+      sister, such a very plain, elderly sister, with hardly a tooth or an aitch
+      in her head, began to relate her religious history. It appeared that she
+      had been a much greater sinner than she looked, and that the mercy shown
+      her had been proportionate. She was vain both of her sins and mercies,
+      poor soul, and in her scrimp figure, with its ill-fitting uniform, Heaven
+      knows how long she went on. I was distracted by a clergyman passing on the
+      outside of the ring of listening women and children, and looking, I chose
+      to think, somewhat sourly askance at the distasteful ceremonial. I wished
+      to stop him, on his way to the Minster, if that was his way, and tell him
+      that so Christianity must have begun, and so the latest form of it must
+      always begin and work round after ages and ages to the beauty and
+      respectability his own ritual has. But I now believe this would have been
+      the greatest impertinence and hypocrisy, for I myself found the
+      performance before us as tasteless and tawdry as he could possibly have
+      done. He was going toward the Minster, and it would make him forget it;
+      but I was going away from it, perhaps, for the last time, and this loud
+      side-show of religion would make me forget the Minster.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Our railway hotel lay a little way out of the town, and after a day&rsquo;s
+      sight-seeing we were to meet or mingle with troops of wholesome-looking
+      workmen whose sturdiness and brightness were a consolation after the pale
+      debility of labor&rsquo;s looks in Sheffield. From the chocolate-factories
+      or the railroad-shops, which are the chief industries of York, they would
+      be crossing the bridge of the Ouse, the famous stream on which the Romans
+      had their town, and which suggested to the Anglicans to call their
+      Eboracum Eurewic&mdash;a town on a river. In due time the Danes modified
+      this name to Yerik, and so we came honestly by the name of our own New
+      York, called after the old York, as soon as the English had robbed the
+      Dutch of it, and the King of England had given the province to his brother
+      the Duke of York. Both cities are still towns on rivers, but the Ouse is
+      no more an image or forecast of the Hudson than Old York is of New York.
+      For that reason, the bridge over it is not to be compared to our Brooklyn
+      Bridge, or even to any bridge which is yet to span the Hudson. The
+      difference is so greatly in our favor that we may well yield our city&rsquo;s
+      mother the primacy in her city wall. We have ourselves as yet no
+      Plantagenet wall, and we have not yet got a mediaeval gate through which
+      the traveller passes in returning from the Flatiron Building to his hotel
+      in the Grand Central Station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We do not begin to have such a hoar antiquity as is articulate in the
+      mother city, speaking with muted voices from the innumerable monuments
+      which the earth has yielded from the site of our hotel and its adjacent
+      railway station. All underground York is doubtless fuller of Home than
+      even Bath is; and it has happened that her civilization was much more
+      largely dug up here than elsewhere when the foundations of the spreading
+      edifices were laid. The relics are mainly the witnesses of pagan Rome, but
+      Christianity politically began in York, as it has politically ended in New
+      York, and doubtless some soldiers of the Sixth Legion and many of the
+      British slaves were religiously Christians in the ancient metropolis
+      before Constantine was elected emperor there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have been in many places where history is hospitably at home and is not
+      merely an unwilling guest, as in our unmemoried land. Florence is very
+      well, Venice is not so bad, Naples has her long thoughts, and Milan is
+      mediaeval-minded, not to speak of Genoa, or Marseilles, or Paris, or those
+      romantic German towns where the legends, if not the facts, abound; but,
+      after all, for my pleasure in the past, I could not choose any place
+      before York. You need not be so very definite in your knowledge. The event
+      of Constantine&rsquo;s presence and election is so spacious as to leave no
+      room for particulars in the imagination; and you are so rich in it that
+      you will even reject them from your thoughts, as you sit in the
+      close-cropped flowery lawn of your hotel garden (try to imagine a railroad
+      hotel garden in <i>New</i> York!) on the sunniest of the afternoons before
+      you are turned out for Doncaster Week, and, while you watch a little
+      adventurous American boy climbing over a pile of rock-work, realize the
+      most august, the most important fact in the story of the race as native to
+      the very air you are breathing! Where you sit you are in full view of the
+      Minster, which is to say in view of something like the towers and
+      battlements of the celestial city. Or if you wake very early on a morning
+      still nearer the fatal Doncaster Week of your impending banishment, and
+      look out of your lofty windows at the sunrise reddening the level bars of
+      cloud behind the Minster, you shall find it bulked up against the
+      pearl-gray masses of the sunny mist which hangs in all the intervening
+      trees, and solidifies them in unbroken masses of foliage. All round your
+      hotel spreads a gridiron of railroad, yet such is the force of the English
+      genius for quiet that you hear no clatter of trains; the expresses whir in
+      and out of the station with not more noise than humming-birds; and amid
+      this peace the past has some chance with modernity. The Britons dwell,
+      unmolested by our latter-day clamor, in their wattled huts and dugouts;
+      the Romans come and make them slaves and then Christians, and after three
+      or four hundred years send word from the Tiber to the Ouse that they can
+      stay no longer, and so leave them naked to their enemies, the Picts and
+      Scots and Saxons and Angles; and in due course come the ravaging and
+      burning Danes; and in due course still, the murdering and plundering and
+      scorning Normans. But all so quietly, like the humming-bird-like
+      expresses, with a kind of railway celerity in the foreshortened
+      retrospect; and after the Normans have crushed themselves down into the
+      mass of the vanquished, and formed the English out of the blend, there
+      follow the many wars of the successions, of the Roses, of the Stuarts,
+      with all the intermediate insurrections and rebellions. In the splendid
+      Histories of Shakespeare, which are full of York, the imagination visits
+      and revisits the place, and you are entreated by mouth of one of his
+      princely personages,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;I pray you let us satisfy our eyes
+      With the memorials and things of fame,
+      That do renown this city,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      where his Henrys and Richards and Margarets and Edwards and Eleanors abide
+      still and shall forever abide while the English speech lasts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0085}.jpg" alt="{0085}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0085}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Something of all this I knew, and more pretended, with a mounting
+      indignation at the fast-coming Doncaster Week which was to turn us out of
+      our hotel. We began our search for other lodgings with what seemed to be
+      increasing failure. The failure had consolation in it so far as the sweet
+      regret of people whose apartments were taken could console. They would
+      have taken us at other hotels for double the usual price, but, when we
+      showed ourselves willing to pay, it proved that they had no rooms at any
+      price. From house to house, then, we went, at first vaingloriously, in the
+      spaces about the Minster, and then meekly into any side street, wherever
+      the legend of Apartments showed itself in a transom. At last, the second
+      day, after being denied at seven successive houses, we found quite the
+      refuge we wanted in the Bootham, which means very much more than the
+      ignorant reader can imagine. Our upper rooms looked on a pretty grassy
+      garden space behind, where there was sun when there was sun, and in front
+      on the fine old brick dwellings of a most personable street, with a
+      sentiment of bygone fashion. At the upper end of it was a famous city gate&mdash;Bootham
+      Bar, namely&mdash;with a practicable portcullis, which we verified at an
+      early moment by going up into &ldquo;the chamber over the gate,&rdquo;
+      where it was once worked, and whence its lower beam, set thick with savage
+      spikes, was dropped. Outside the gate there was a sign in the wall saying
+      that guards were to be had there to guide travellers through the Forest of
+      Galtres beyond Bootham, and keep them from the wolves. Now woods and
+      wolves and guards are all gone, and Bootham Bar is never closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The upper room is a passageway for people who are walking round the town
+      on the Plantagenet wall, and one morning we took this walk in sunshine
+      that befitted the Sabbath. Half the children of York seemed to be taking
+      it, too, with their good parents, who had stayed away from church to give
+      them this pleasure, the fathers putting on their frock-coats and top-hats,
+      which are worn on no other days in the provincial cities of England. For a
+      Plantagenet wall, that of York is in excellent repair, and it is very
+      clean, so that the children could not spoil their Sunday best by
+      clambering on the parapet, and trying to fall over it. There was no
+      parapet on the other side, and they could have fallen over that without
+      trouble; but it would not have served the same purpose; for under the
+      parapet there were the most alluringly ragged little boys, with untidy
+      goats and delightfully dirty geese. There was no trace of a moat outside
+      the wall, where pleasant cottages pressed close to it with their gardens
+      full of bright flowers. At one point there were far-spreading sheep and
+      cattle pens, where there is a weekly market, and at another the old Norman
+      castle which cruel Conqueror William built to hold the city, and which has
+      suffered change, not unpicturesque, into prisons for unluckier criminals,
+      and the Assize Courts for their condemnation. From time to time the wall
+      left off, and then we got down, perforce, and walked to the next piece of
+      it. In these pieces we made the most of the old gates, especially Walmgate
+      Bar, which has a barbican. I should be at a loss to say why the barbican
+      should have commended it so; perhaps it was because we there realized, for
+      the first time, what a barbican was; I doubt if the reader knows, now.
+      Otherwise, I should have preferred Monk Bar or Micklegate Bar, as being
+      more like those I was used to in the theatre. But we came back gladly to
+      Bootham Bar, holding that a portcullis was equal any day to a barbican,
+      and feeling as if we had got home in the more familiar neighborhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were small shops in the Bootham, thread-and-needle stores, newspaper
+      stores, and provision stores mainly, which I affected, and there was one
+      united florist&rsquo;s and fruiterer&rsquo;s which I particularly liked
+      because of the conversability of the proprietor. He was a stout man, of a
+      vinous complexion, with what I should call here, where our speech is
+      mostly uncouth, an educated accent, though with few and wandering
+      aspirates in it. Him I visited every morning to buy for my breakfast one
+      of those Spanish melons which they have everywhere in England, and which
+      put our native cantaloupes to shame; and we always fell into a little talk
+      over our transaction of fourpence or sixpence, as the case might be. After
+      I had confided that I was an American, he said one day, &ldquo;Ah, the
+      Americans are clever people.&rdquo; Then he added, &ldquo;I hope you won&rsquo;t
+      mind my saying it, sir, but I think their ladies are rather harder than
+      our English ladies, sir.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I eagerly assented. &ldquo;How do you mean? Sharper?
+      Keener?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, not just that, sir.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;More practical? More business-like?&rdquo; I pursued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I shouldn&rsquo;t like to say that, sir. But&mdash;they seem
+      rather harder, sir; at least, judging from what I see of them in York,
+      sir. Rather harder, sir.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We remained not the less friends with that mystery between us; and I
+      bought my last melon of him on my last morning, when the early September
+      had turned somewhat sharply chill. That turn made me ask what the winter
+      was in York, and he boasted it very cold, with ice and snow aplenty, and
+      degrees of frost much like our own. But apparently those York women
+      resisted it and remained of a tenderness which contrasted to their
+      advantage with the summer hardness of our women.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It was a pleasure, which I should be glad to share with the reader, to
+      lose one&rsquo;s self in the streets of York. They were all kinds of
+      streets except straight, and they seemed not to go anywhere except for the
+      joke of bringing the wayfarer unexpectedly back to, or near, his
+      starting-point and far from his goal. The blame of their vagariousness, if
+      it was a fault, is put upon the Danes, who found York when they captured
+      it very rectangular, for so the Romans built it, and so the Angles kept
+      it; but nothing would serve the Danes but to crook its streets and call
+      them gates, so that the real gates of the city have to be called bars, or
+      else the stranger might take them for streets. If he asked another
+      wayfarer, he could sometimes baffle the streets, and get to the point he
+      aimed at, but, whether he did or not, he could always amuse himself in
+      them; they would take a friendly interest in him, and show him the old
+      houses and churches which the American stranger prefers. They abound in
+      the poorer sorts of buildings, of course, just as they do in the poorer
+      sorts of people, but in their simpler courts and squares and expanses they
+      have often dignified mansions of that Georgian architecture which seems
+      the last word in its way, and which is known here in our older edifices as
+      there in their newer. Some of them are said to have &ldquo;richly carved
+      ceilings, wainscoted, panelled rooms, chimneypieces with paintings framed
+      in the over-mantel, dentilled cornices, and pedimented doors,&rdquo; and I
+      could well believe it, as I passed them with an envious heart. There were
+      gardens behind these mansions which hung their trees over the spiked
+      coping of their high-shouldered walls and gates, and sequestered I know
+      not what damp social events in their flowery and leafy bounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0091}.jpg" alt="{0091}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0091}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      At times I distinctly wished to know something of the life of York, but I
+      was not in the way of it. The nearest to an acquaintance I had there,
+      besides my critical fruiterer, was the actor whose name I recognized on
+      his bills as that of a brave youth who had once dramatized a novel of
+      mine, and all too briefly played the piece, and who was now to come to
+      York for a week of Shakespeare. Perhaps I could not forgive him the
+      recrudescence; at any rate, I did not try to see him, and there was no
+      other social chance for me, except as I could buy in for a few glimpses at
+      the tidy confectioners&rsquo;, where persons of civil condition resorted
+      for afternoon tea. Even to these one could not speak, and I could only do
+      my best in a little mercenary conversation with the bookseller about York
+      histories. The bookstores were not on our scale, and generally the shops
+      in York were not of the modern department type, but were perhaps the
+      pleasanter for that reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In my earlier wanderings I made the acquaintance of a most agreeable
+      market-place, stretching the length of two squares, which on a Saturday
+      afternoon I found filled with every manner of bank and booth and canopied
+      counter, three deep, and humming pleasantly with traffic in everything one
+      could eat, drink, wear, or read; there seemed as many book-stalls as
+      fruit-stalls. What I noted equally with the prettiness of the abounding
+      flowers was the mild kindness of the market-people&rsquo;s manners and
+      their extreme anxiety to state exactly the quality of the things they had
+      for sale. They seemed incapable of deceit, but I do not say they really
+      were so. My own transactions were confined to the purchase of some
+      golden-gage plums, and I advise the reader rather to buy greengages; the
+      other plums practised the deception in their looks which their venders
+      abhorred.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I wandered in a perfectly contemporary mood through the long ranks and
+      lanes of the marketplace, and did not know till afterward that at one end
+      of it, called the Pavement, the public executions used to take place for
+      those great or small occasions which brought folks to the block or
+      scaffold in the past. I had later some ado to verify the dismal fact from
+      a cluster of people before a tavern who seemed to be taking bets for the
+      Doncaster Week, and I could hardly keep them from booking me for this
+      horse or that when I merely wanted to know whether it was on a certain
+      spot the Earl of Northumberland had his head cut off for leading a rising
+      against Henry IV.; or some such execution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What riches of story has not York to browbeat withal the storyless
+      New-Yorker who visits her! That Henry IV. was he whom I had lately seen
+      triumphing near Shrewsbury in the final battle of the Roses, where the Red
+      was so bloodily set above the White; and it was his poetic fancy to have
+      Northumberland, when he bade him come to York, pass through the gateway on
+      which the head of his son, Hotspur Harry, was festering. No wonder the
+      earl led a rising against his liege, who had first mercifully meant to
+      imprison him for life, and then more mercifully pardoned him. But there
+      seems to have been fighting up and down the centuries from the beginning,
+      in York, interspersed with praying and wedding and feasting. After the
+      citizens drove out Conqueror William&rsquo;s garrison, and Earl Waltheof
+      provided against the Normans&rsquo; return by standing at the castle gate
+      and chopping their heads off with his battle-axe as they came forth,
+      William efficaciously devastated the city and the country as far as
+      Durham. His son William gave it a church, and that &ldquo;worthy peer,&rdquo;
+      King Stephen, a hospital. In his time the archbishop and barons of York
+      beat the Scotch hard by, and the next Scotch king had to do homage to
+      Henry II. at York for his kingdom. Henry III. married his sister at York
+      to one Scotch king and his daughter to that king&rsquo;s successor. Edward
+      I. and his queen Eleanor honored with their presence the translation of
+      St. William&rsquo;s bones to the Minster; Edward II. retreated from his
+      defeat at Bannockburn to York, and Edward III. was often there for a king&rsquo;s
+      varied occasions of fighting and feasting. Weak Henry VI. and his wilful
+      Margaret, after their defeat at Towton by Edward IV., escaped from the
+      city just in time, and Edward entered York under his own father&rsquo;s
+      head on Micklegate Bar. Richard III. was welcomed there before his rout
+      and death at Bosworth, and was truly mourned by the citizens. Henry VII.
+      wedded Elizabeth, the &ldquo;White Rose of York,&rdquo; and afterward
+      visited her city; Mary, Queen of Scots, was once in hiding there, and her
+      uncouth son stayed two nights in York on his way to be crowned James I. in
+      London. His son, Charles I., was there early in his reign, and touched
+      many for the king&rsquo;s evil; later, he was there again, but could not
+      cure the sort of king&rsquo;s evil which raged past all magic in the
+      defeat of his followers at Marston Moor by Cromwell. The city yielded to
+      the Puritans, whose temperament had already rather characterized it. James
+      II., as Duke of York, made it his brief sojourn; &ldquo;proud Cumberland,&rdquo;
+      returning from Culloden after the defeat of the Pretender, visited the
+      city and received its freedom for destroying the last hope of the Stuarts;
+      perhaps the twenty-two rebels who were then put to death in York were
+      executed in the very square where those wicked men thought I was wanting
+      to play the horses. The reigning family has paid divers visits to the
+      ancient metropolis, which was the capital of Britain before London was
+      heard of. The old prophecy of her ultimate primacy must make time if it is
+      to fulfil itself and increase York&rsquo;s seventy-two thousand beyond
+      London&rsquo;s six million.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IX
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I should be at a loss to say why its English memories haunted my York less
+      than the Roman associations of the place. They form, however, rather a
+      clutter of incidents, whereas the few spreading facts of Hadrian&rsquo;s
+      stay, the deaths of Severus and Constantius, and the election of
+      Constantine, his son, enlarge themselves to the atmospheric compass of the
+      place, but leave a roominess in which the fancy may more commodiously orb
+      about. I was on terms of more neighborly intimacy with the poor Punic
+      emperor than with any one else in York, doubtless because, when he fell
+      sick, he visited the temple of Bellona near Bootham Bar, and paid his
+      devotions unmolested, let us hope, by any prevision of the misbehavior of
+      his son Caracalla (whose baths I had long ago visited at Rome) in killing
+      his other son Geta. Everywhere I could be an early Christian, in company
+      with Constantine, in whom the instinct of political Christianity must have
+      begun to stir as soon as he was chosen emperor. But I dare say I heard the
+      muted tramp of the Sixth Legion about the Yorkish streets above all other
+      martial sounds because I stayed as long as Doncaster Week would let me in
+      the railway hotel, which so many of their bones made room for when the
+      foundations of it were laid, with those of the adherent station. Their
+      bones seem to have been left there, after the disturbance, but their
+      sepulchres were respectfully transferred to the museum of the
+      Philosophical Society, in the grounds where the ruins of St. Mary&rsquo;s
+      Abbey rise like fragments of pensive music or romantic verse, inviting the
+      moonlight and the nightingale, but, wanting these, make shift with the
+      noonday and the babies in perambulators neglected by nurse-girls reading
+      novels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0097}.jpg" alt="{0097}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0097}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      The babies and the nurses are not allowed in the museum of antiquities,
+      which is richer in Roman remains than any that one sees outside of Italy.
+      There are floors of mosaic, large and perfect, taken from the villas which
+      people are always digging up in the neighborhood of York, and, from the
+      graves uncovered in the railway excavations, coffins of lead and stone for
+      civilians, and of rude tiles for the soldiers of the Sixth Legion; the
+      slaves were cast into burial-pits of tens and twenties and left to
+      indiscriminate decay till they should be raised in the universal
+      incorruption. Probably the slaves were the earliest Christians at York;
+      certainly the monuments are pagan, as the inmates of the tombs must have
+      been. Some of the monuments bear inscriptions from loving wives and
+      husbands to the partners they have lost, and some of the stone coffins are
+      those of children. It is all infinitely touching, and after two thousand
+      years the heart aches for the fathers and mothers who laid their little
+      ones away in these hard cradles for their last sleep. Faith changes, but
+      constant death remains the same, and life is not very different in any
+      age, when it comes to the end. The Roman exiles who had come so far to
+      hold my British ancestors in subjection to their alien rule seemed
+      essentially not only of the same make as me, but the same civilization.
+      Their votive altars and inscriptions to other gods expressed a human piety
+      of like anxiety and helplessness with ours, and called to a like
+      irresponsive sky. A hundred witnesses of their mortal state&mdash;jars and
+      vases and simple household utensils&mdash;fill the shelves of the museum;
+      but the most awful, the most beautiful appeal of the past is in that mass
+      of dark auburn hair which is kept here in a special urn and uncovered for
+      your supreme emotion. It is equally conjectured to be the hair of a Roman
+      lady or of a British princess, but is of a young girl certainly, dressed
+      twenty centuries ago for the tomb in which it was found, and still faintly
+      lucent with the fashionable unguent of the day, and kept in form by pins
+      of jet. One thinks of the little, slender hands that used to put them
+      there, and of the eyes that confronted themselves in the silver mirror
+      under the warm shadow that the red-gold mass cast upon the white forehead.
+      This sanctuary of the past was the most interesting place in that most
+      interesting city of York, and the day of our first visit a princess of New
+      York sat reading a book in the midst of it, waiting for the rain to be
+      over, which was waiting for her to come out and then begin again. We knew
+      her from having seen her at the station in relation to some trunks bearing
+      her initials and those of her native city; and she could be about the age
+      of the York princess or young Roman lady whose hair was kept in the urn
+      hard by.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      X
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There is in York a little, old, old church, whose dear and reverend name I
+      have almost forgotten, if ever I knew it, but I think it is Holy Trinity
+      Goodramgate, which divides the heart of my adoration with the Minster. We
+      came to it quite by accident, one of our sad September afternoons, after
+      we had been visiting the Guildhall, Venetianly overhanging the canal calm
+      of the Ouse, and very worthy to be seen for its York histories in stained
+      glass. The custodian had surprised us and the gentlemen of the committee
+      by taking us into the room where they were investigating the claims of the
+      registered voters to the suffrage; and so, much entertained and
+      instructed, we issued forth, and, passing by the church in which Guy
+      Fawkes was baptized, only too ineffectually, we came quite unexpectedly
+      upon Holy Trinity Goodramgate, if that and not another is indeed its name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It stands sequestered in a little leafy and grassy space of its own, with
+      a wall hardly overlooked on one side by low stone cottages, the immemorial
+      homes of rheumatism and influenza. The church had the air of not knowing
+      that it is of Perpendicular and Decorated Gothic, with a square,
+      high-shouldered tower, as it bulks up to a very humble height from the
+      turf to the boughs overhead, or that it has a nice girl sketching its
+      doorway, where a few especially favored weddings and funerals may enter.
+      It is open once a year for service, and when the tourist will, or can, for
+      the sight of the time-mellowed, beautiful stained glass of its eastward
+      window. The oaken pews are square and high-shouldered, like the low church
+      tower; and, without, the soft yellow sandstone is crumbling away from the
+      window traceries. The church did not look as if it felt itself a thousand
+      years old, and perhaps it is not; but I never was in a place where I
+      seemed so like a ghost of that antiquity. I had a sense of haunting it, in
+      the inner twilight and the outer sunlight, where a tender wind was
+      stirring the leaves of its embowering trees and scattering them on the
+      graves of my eleventh and twelfth century contemporaries.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We chose the sunniest morning we could for our visit to Clifford&rsquo;s
+      Tower, which remains witness of the Norman castle the Conqueror built and
+      rebuilt to keep the Danish-Anglian-Roman-British town in awe. But the
+      tower was no part of the original castle, and only testifies of it by
+      hearsay. That was built by Roger de Clifford, who suffered death with his
+      party chief, the Earl of Lancaster, when Edward of York took the city, and
+      it is mainly memorable as the refuge of the Jews whom the Christians had
+      harried out of their homes. They had grown in numbers and riches, when the
+      Jew-hate of 1190 broke out in England, as from time to time the Jew-hate
+      breaks out in Russia now, to much the same cruel effect. They were
+      followed and besieged in the castle, and, seeing that they must be
+      captured, they set fire to the place, and five hundred slew themselves.
+      Some that promised to be Christians came out and were killed by their
+      brethren in Christ. In New York the Christians have grown milder, and now
+      they only keep the Jews out of their clubs and their homes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0103}.jpg" alt="{0103}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0103}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      The Clifford Tower leans very much to one side, so that as you ascend it
+      for the magnificent view from the top you have to incline yourself the
+      other way, as you do in the Tower of Pisa, to help it keep its balance.
+      The morning of our visit, so gay in its forgetfulness of the tragical
+      past, we found the place in charge of an old soldier, an Irishman who had
+      learned, as custodian, a professional compassion for those poor Jews of
+      nine hundred years ago, and, being moved by our confession of our
+      nationality, owned to three &ldquo;nevvies&rdquo; in New Haven. So small
+      is the world and so closely knit in the ties of a common humanity and a
+      common citizenship, native and adoptive!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The country around York looked so beautiful from Clifford&rsquo;s Tower
+      that we would not be satisfied till we had seen it closer, and we chose a
+      bright, cool September afternoon for our drive out of the town and over
+      the breezy, high levels which surround it. The first British capital could
+      hardly have been more nobly placed, and one could not help grieving that
+      the Ouse should have indolently lost York that early dignity by letting
+      its channel fill up with silt and spoil its navigation. The Thames managed
+      better for York&rsquo;s upstart rival London, and yet the Ouse is not
+      destitute of sea or river craft. These were of both steam and sail, and I
+      myself have witnessed the energy with which the reluctance of the indolent
+      stream is sometimes overcome. I do not suppose that anywhere else, when
+      the wind is low, is a vessel madly hurled through the water at a mile an
+      hour by means of a rope tied to its mast and pulled by a fatherly old
+      horse under the intermittent drivership of two boys whom he could hardly
+      keep to the work. I loved the banks of a stream where one could see such a
+      triumph of man over nature, and where nature herself was so captivating.
+      All that grassy and shady neighborhood seemed a public promenade, where on
+      a Sunday one could see the lower middle classes in their best and
+      brightest, and it had for all its own the endearing and bewitching name of
+      Ings. Why cannot we have Ings by the Hudson side?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      TWO YORKISH EPISODES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Certainly I had not come to York, as certainly I would not have gone
+      anywhere, for battle-fields, but becoming gradually sensible in that city
+      that the battle of Marston Moor was fought a few miles away, and my enemy
+      Charles I. put to one of his worst defeats there, I bought a third-class
+      ticket and ran out to the place one day for whatever emotion awaited me
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      At an English station you are either overwhelmed with transportation, or
+      you are without any except such as you were born with, and at the station
+      for Marston Moor I asked for a fly in vain. But it was a most walkable
+      afternoon, and the pleasant road into the region which the station-master
+      indicated as that I was seeking invited the foot by its level stretch,
+      sometimes under wayside trees, but mostly between open fields, newly
+      reaped and still yellow with their stubble, or green with the rowen
+      clover. Sometimes it ran straight and sometimes it curved, but it led so
+      rarely near any human habitation that one would rather not have met any
+      tramps beside one&rsquo;s self on it. Presently I overtook one, a gentle
+      old farm-wife, a withered blonde, whom I helped with the bundles she bore
+      in either hand, in the hope that she could tell me whether I was near
+      Marston Moor or not. But she could tell me only, what may have been of
+      higher human interest, that her husband had the grass farm of a hundred
+      and fifty acres, which we were coming to, for seventy-five pounds a year;
+      and they had their own cattle, sheep, and horses, and were well content
+      with themselves. She excused herself for not knowing more than vaguely of
+      the battle-field, as not having been many years in the neighborhood; and
+      being now come to a gate in the fields, she thanked me and took her way up
+      a grassy path to the pleasant farmhouse I saw in the distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have been about this time that it rained, having shone long enough
+      for English weather, and it hardly held up before I was overtaken by a
+      friendly youth on a bicycle, whom I stayed with the question uppermost in
+      my mind. He promptly got off his wheel to grapple with the problem. He was
+      a comely young fellow, an artisan of some sort from a neighboring town,
+      and he knew the country well, but he did not know where my lost
+      battle-field was. He was sure that it was near by: but he was sure there
+      was no monument to mark the spot. Then we parted friends, with many polite
+      expressions, and he rode on and I walked on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a mile and more I met no other wayfarer, and as I felt that it was
+      time to ask for Marston Moor again, I was very glad to be overtaken by a
+      gentleman driving in a dog-cart, with his pretty young daughter on the
+      wide seat with him. He halted at sight of the elderly pilgrim, and
+      hospitably asked if he could not give him a lift, alleging that there was
+      plenty of room. He was interested in my search, which he was not able
+      definitely to promote, but he believed that if I would drive with him to
+      his place I could find the battle-field, and, anyhow, I could get a trap
+      back from the The Sun. I pleaded the heat I was in from walking, and the
+      danger for an old fellow of taking cold in a drive through the cool air;
+      and then, as old fellows do, we bantered each other about our ages, each
+      claiming to be older than the other, and the kind, sweet young girl sat
+      listening with that tolerance of youth for the triviality of age which is
+      so charming. When he could do no more, he said he was sorry, and wished me
+      luck, and drove on; and I being by this time tired with my three miles&rsquo;
+      tramp, took advantage of a wayside farmhouse, the first in all the
+      distance, and went in and asked for a cup of tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The farm-wife, who came in out of her back garden to answer my knock,
+      pleaded regretfully that her fire was down; but she thought I could get
+      tea at the next house; and she was very conversable about the
+      battle-field. She did not know just where it was, but she was sure it was
+      quite a mile farther on; and at that I gave up the hope of it along with
+      the tea. This is partly the reader&rsquo;s loss, for I have no doubt I
+      could have been very graphic about it if I had found it; but as for
+      Marston Moor, I feel pretty certain that if it ever existed it does not
+      now. A moor, as I understand, implies a sort of wildness, but nothing
+      could be more domestic than the peaceful fields between which I had come
+      so far, and now easily found my way back to the station. Easily, I say,
+      but there was one point where the road forked, though I was sure it had
+      not forked before, and I felt myself confronted with some sort, any sort,
+      of exciting adventure. By taking myself firmly in hand, and saying,
+      &ldquo;It was yonder to the left where I met my kind bicycler, and we
+      vainly communed of my evanescent battle-field,&rdquo; and so keeping on, I
+      got safely to the station with nothing more romantic in my experience than
+      a thrilling apprehension.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I quite forgot Marston Moor in my self-gratulation and my recognition of
+      the civility from every one which had so ineffectively abetted my search.
+      Simple and gentle, how hospitable they had all been to my vain inquiry,
+      and how delicately they had forborne to visit the stranger with the irony
+      of the average American who is asked anything, especially anything he does
+      not know! I went thinking that the difference was a difference between
+      human nature long mellowed to its conditions, and human nature rasped on
+      its edges and fretted by novel circumstances to a provisional harshness. I
+      chose to fancy that unhuman nature sympathized with the English mood; in
+      the sheep bleating from the pastures I heard the note of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+      verse; and by the sky, hung in its low blue with rough, dusky clouds, I
+      was canopied as with a canvas of Constable&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the more pity, then, that at the station a shooting party,
+      approaching from the other quarter with their servants and guns and dogs,
+      and their bags of hares and partridges, should have given English life
+      another complexion to the wanderer so willing to see it always rose color.
+      The gunners gained the station platform first, and at once occupied the
+      benches, strewing all the vacant places with their still bleeding prey. I
+      did not fail of the opportunity to see in them the arrogance of class,
+      which I had hitherto so vainly expected, and I disabled their looks by
+      finding them as rude as their behavior. How different they were from the
+      kind bicycler, or the gentleman in the dog-cart, or either one of the
+      farm-wives who sorrowed so civilly not to know where my lost battle-field
+      was!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In England, it is always open to the passenger to enforce a claim to his
+      share of the public facilities, but I chose to go into the licensed
+      victualler&rsquo;s next the station and sit down to a peaceable cup of tea
+      rather than contest a place on that bloody benching; and so I made the
+      acquaintance of an interior out of literature, such as my beloved Thomas
+      Hardy likes to paint. On a high-backed rectangular settle rising against
+      the wall, and almost meeting in front of the comfortable range, sat a
+      company of rustics, stuffing themselves with cold meat, washed down with
+      mugs of ale, and cozily talking. They gained indefinitely in my interest
+      from being served by a lame woman, with a rhythmical limp, and I hope it
+      was not for my demerit that I was served apart in the chillier parlor,
+      when I should have liked so much to stay and listen to the rustic tale or
+      talk. The parlor was very depressingly papered, but on its walls I had the
+      exalted company of his Majesty the King, their Royal Highnesses the Prince
+      and Princess of Wales, the late Premier, the Marquis of Salisbury, and,
+      for no assignable reason except a general fitness for high society, the
+      twelve Apostles in Da Vinci&rsquo;s <i>Last Supper</i>, together with an
+      appropriate view of York Minster.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I do not pretend this search for the battle-field of Marston Moor was the
+      most exciting episode of my stay in York. In fact, I think it was much
+      surpassed in a climax of dramatic poignancy incident to our excursion to
+      Bishopsthorpe, down the Ouse, on one of the cosey little steamers which
+      ply the stream without unreasonably crowding it against its banks. It was
+      a most silvery September afternoon when we started from the quay at York,
+      and after escaping from embarkment on a boat going in the wrong direction,
+      began, with no unseemly swiftness, to scuttle down the current. It was a
+      perfect voyage, as perfect as any I ever made on the Mississippi, the
+      Ohio, the St. Lawrence, or the Hudson, on steamers in whose cabins our
+      little boat would have lost itself. We had a full but not crowded company
+      of passengers, overflowing into a skiff at our stern, in which a father
+      and mother, with three women friends, preferred the high excitement of
+      being towed to Bishopsthorpe, where it seemed that the man of the party
+      knew the gardener. With each curve of the river and with each remove we
+      got the city in more and more charming retrospective, till presently its
+      roofs and walls and spires and towers were lost in the distance, and we
+      were left to the sylvan or pastoral loveliness of the low shores. Here and
+      there at a pleasant interval from the river a villa rose against a
+      background of rounded tree tops, with Lombardy poplars picking themselves
+      out before it, but for the most part the tops of the banks, with which we
+      stood even on our deck, retreated from the waterside willows in levels of
+      meadow-land, where white and red cows were grazing, and now and then young
+      horses romping away from groups of their elders. It was all dear and kind
+      and sweet, with a sort of mid-Western look in its softness (as the English
+      landscape often has), and the mud-banks were like those of my native Ohio
+      Valley rivers. The effect was heightened, on our return, by an aged and
+      virtuously poor (to all appearance) flageolet and cornet band, playing <i>&lsquo;Way
+      down upon the Suwanee River</i>, while the light played in &ldquo;ditties
+      no-tone&rdquo; over the groves and pastures of the shore, and the shadows
+      stretched themselves luxuriously out as if for a long night&rsquo;s sleep.
+      There has seldom been such a day since I began to grow old; a soft
+      September gale ruffled and tossed the trees finely, and a subtle Italian
+      quality mixed with the American richness of the sunshiny air; so that I
+      thought we reached Bishopsthorpe only too soon, and I woke from a pleasant
+      reverie to be told that the steamer could not land with us, but we must be
+      taken ashore in the small boat which we saw putting out for us from its
+      moorings. To this day I do not know why the steamer could not land, but
+      perhaps the small boat had a prescriptive right in the matter. At any
+      rate, it was vigorously manned by a woman, who took tuppence from each of
+      us for her service, and presently earned it by the interest she showed in
+      our getting to the Archbishop&rsquo;s palace, or villa, the right way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0116}.jpg" alt="{0116}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0116}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      So we went round by an alluring road to its forking, where, looking up to
+      the left, we could see a pretty village behind Lombardy poplars, and
+      coming down toward us in a victoria for their afternoon drive, two
+      charmingly dressed ladies, with bright parasols, and looking very
+      county-family, as we poor Americans imagine such things out of English
+      fiction. We entered the archiepiscopal grounds through a sympathetic
+      Gothic screen, as I will call the overture to the Gothic edifice in my
+      defect of architectural terminology, though perhaps gateway would be
+      simpler; and found ourselves in the garden, and in the company of those
+      people we had towed down behind our steamer. They were with their friend,
+      the gardener, and, claiming their acquaintance as fellow-passengers, we
+      made favor with him to see the house. The housekeeper, or some understudy
+      of hers, who received us, said the family were away, but she let us follow
+      her through. That is more than I will let the reader do, for I know the
+      duty of the cultivated American to the intimacies of the gentle English
+      life; it is only with the simple life that I ever make free; there, I own,
+      I have no scruple. But I will say (with my back turned conscientiously to
+      the interior) that nothing could be lovelier than the outlook from the
+      dining-room, and the whole waterfront of the house, on the wavy and
+      willowy Ouse, and that I would willingly be many times an archbishop to
+      have that prospect at all my meals.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We despatched our visit so promptly that we got back to our boat-woman&rsquo;s
+      cottage a full hour before our steamer was to call for us. She had an
+      afternoon fire kindled in her bright range, from the oven of which came
+      already the odor of agreeable baking. Upon this hint we acted, and asked
+      if tea were possible. It was, and jam sandwiches as well, or if we
+      preferred buttered tea-cake, with or without currants, to jam sandwiches,
+      there would be that presently. We preferred both, and we sat down in that
+      pleasant parlor-kitchen, and listened, till the tea-cake came out of the
+      oven and was split open and buttered smoking hot, to a flow of delightful
+      and instructive talk. For our refection we paid sixpence each, but for our
+      edification we are still, and hope ever to be, in debt. Our hostess was of
+      a most cheerful philosophy, such as could not be bought of most modern
+      philosophers for money. The flour for our tea-cakes, she said, was a
+      shilling fivepence a stone, &ldquo;And not too much for growing and
+      grinding it, and all.&rdquo; Every week-day morning she rose at half-past
+      four, and got breakfast for her boys, who then rode their bicycles, or, in
+      the snow, walked, all the miles of our voyage into York, where they worked
+      in the railway shops. No, they did not belong to any union; the railway
+      men did not seem to care for it; only a &ldquo;benefit union.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She kept the house for her family, and herself ready to answer every hail
+      from the steamer; but in her mellow English content, which was not stupid
+      or sodden, but clever and wise, it was as if it were she, rather than the
+      archbishop, whose nature expressed itself in a motto on one of the palace
+      walls, &ldquo;Blessed be the Lord who loadeth us with blessings every day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the range, warming to its work, had made her kitchen-parlor a little
+      too hot to hold us, she hospitably suggested the river shore as cooler,
+      where she knew a comfortable log we could sit on. Thither she presently
+      followed when the steamer&rsquo;s whistle sounded, and held her boat for
+      us to get safely in. The most nervous of our party offered the reflection,
+      as she sculled us out into the stream to overhaul the pausing steamer,
+      that she must find the ferry business very shattering to the nerves, and
+      she said,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but it&rsquo;s nothing to a murder case I was on, once.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, what murder, what murder?&rdquo; we palpitated back; and both
+      of us forgot the steamer, so that it almost ran us down, while our
+      ferrywoman began again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man shot a nurse&mdash;There! Throw that line, will you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he, who ought to have thrown the line for her, in his distraction let
+      her drop her oar and throw the line herself, and then we scrambled aboard
+      without hearing any more of the murder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is the climax I have been working up to, and I call it a fine one; as
+      good as a story to be continued ever ended an instalment with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Doncaster Races lured us from our hotel at York, on the first day, as
+      I had dimly foreboded they would. In fact, if there had been no lure, I
+      might have gone in search of temptation, for in a world where sins are apt
+      to be ugly, a horse-race is so beautiful that if one loves beauty he can
+      practise an aesthetic virtue by sinning in that sort. So I made myself a
+      pretence of profit as well as pleasure, and in going to Doncaster I
+      feigned the wish chiefly to compare its high event with that of Saratoga.
+      I had no association with the place save horse-racing, and having missed
+      Ascot and Derby Day, I took my final chance in pursuit of knowledge&mdash;I
+      said to myself, &ldquo;Not mere amusement&rdquo;&mdash;and set out for
+      Doncaster unburdened by the lightest fact concerning the place.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I learned nothing of it when there, but I have since learned, from divers
+      trustworthy sources, that Doncaster is the Danum of Antoninus and the Dona
+      Ceaster of the Saxons, and that it is not only on the line of the
+      Northeastern Railway, but also on that famous Watling Street which from
+      the earliest Saxon time has crossed the British continent from sea to sea,
+      and seems to impress most of the cities north and south into a conformity
+      with its line, like a map of the straightest American railway routes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unless my ignorance has been abused, nothing remarkable has happened at
+      Doncaster in two thousand years, but this is itself a distinction in that
+      eventful England where so many things have happened elsewhere. It is the
+      market town of a rich farming region, and has notable manufactures of iron
+      and brass, of sacking and linen, of spun flax and of agricultural machines
+      and implements. Otherwise, it is important only for its races, which began
+      there three hundred years ago, and especially for its St. Leger Day, of
+      which Lieutenant-General St. Leger became the patron saint in 1778, though
+      he really established his Day two years earlier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doncaster is a mighty pleasant, friendly, rather modern, and commonplacely
+      American-looking town, with two-story trams gently ambling up and down its
+      chief avenues, in the leisurely English fashion, and all of more or less
+      arrival and departure at the race-grounds. In our company the reader will
+      have our appetites for lunch, and if he will take his chance with us in
+      the first simple place away from the station, he will help us satisfy them
+      very wholesomely and agreeably at boards which seem festively set up for
+      the occasion, and spread with hot roast-beef and the plain vegetables
+      which accompany the national dish in its native land; or he can have the
+      beef cold, or have cold lamb or chicken cold. His fellow-lunchers will be,
+      as he may like well enough to fancy, of somewhat lower degree than
+      himself, but they will all seem very respectable, and when they come out
+      together, they will all be equalized in the sudden excitement which has
+      possessed itself of the street, and lined the curbstones up and down with
+      spectators, their bodies bent forward, and their faces turned in the
+      direction of the station.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The excitement is caused by the coming of the King; and I wish that I
+      could present that event in just its sincere unimpressiveness. I have
+      assisted at several such events on the Continent, where, especially in
+      Germany, they are heralded as they are in the theatre, with a blare of
+      trumpets, and a sensation in the populace and the attendant military
+      little short of an ague fit. There, as soon as the majesties mount into
+      their carriages from the station, they drive off as swiftly as their
+      horses can trot, and their subjects, who have been waiting for hours to
+      see them, make what they can of a meagre half-minute&rsquo;s glimpse of
+      them. But how different was the behavior of that easy-going Majesty of
+      England! As soon as I heard that he was coming, I perceived how anxious I
+      had been in the half-year of my English sojourn to see him, and how
+      bitterly I should have been disappointed to leave his realms without it.
+      All kings are bad, I knew that well enough; but I also knew that some
+      kings are not so bad as others, and I had been willing to accept at their
+      face the golden opinions of this King, which, almost without exception,
+      his lieges seemed to hold. Of course it is not hard to think well of a
+      king if you are under him, just as it is not hard to think ill of him if
+      you are not under him; but there is no use being bigotedly republican when
+      there is nothing to be got by it, and I own the fact that his subjects
+      like him willingly. Probably no man in his kingdom understands better than
+      Edward VII. that he is largely a form, and that the more a form he is the
+      more conformable he is to the English ideal of a monarch. But no
+      Englishman apparently knows better than he when to leave off being a form
+      and become a man, and he has endeared himself to his people from time to
+      time by such inspirations. He is reputed on all hands to be a man of great
+      good sense; if he is ever fooled it is not by himself, but by the system
+      which he is no more a part of than the least of his subjects. If he will
+      let a weary old man or a delicate woman stand indefinitely before him, he
+      is no more to blame for that than for speaking English with a trace of
+      German in his <i>th</i> sounds; he did not invent his origins or his
+      traditions. Personally, having had it out with life, he is as amiable and
+      as unceremonious as a king may be. He shares, as far as he can, the great
+      and little interests of his people. He has not, so far as noted, the gifts
+      of some of his sisters, but he has much of his mother&rsquo;s steadfast
+      wisdom, and his father&rsquo;s instinct for the right side in considerable
+      questions; and he has his father&rsquo;s prescience of the psychological
+      moment for not bothering. Of course, he is a fetish; no Englishman can
+      deny that the kingship is an idolatry; but he is a fetish with an uncommon
+      share of the common man&rsquo;s divinity. The system which provides him
+      for the people provides them the best administration in the world, always
+      naturally in the hands of their superiors, social and political; but we
+      could be several times rottener than we administratively are, and still be
+      incalculably reasonabler, as republicans, than those well-governed
+      monarchists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0126}.jpg" alt="{0126}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0126}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      Some of us are apt to forget the immense advantage which we have of the
+      monarchical peoples in having cast away the very name of King, for with
+      the name goes the nature of royalty and all that is under and around it.
+      But because we are largely a fond and silly folk, with a false conceit of
+      ourselves and others, we like to make up romances about the favor in which
+      thrones, municipalities, and powers hold us. Once it was the Tsar of
+      Russia who held us dear, and would do almost anything for Americans; now
+      it is the King of England who is supposed rather to prefer us to his own
+      people, and to delight to honor us. We attribute to him a feeling which a
+      little thought would teach, us was wholly our own, and which would be out
+      of nature if not out of reason with him. He is a man of sense, and not of
+      sentiment, and except as a wise politician he could have no affection for
+      a nation whose existence denies him. He is very civil to Americans; it is
+      part of a constitutional king&rsquo;s business to be civil to every one;
+      but he is probably not sentimental about us; and we need not be
+      sentimental about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked like a man of sense, and not like a man of sentiment, that day
+      as he drove through the Doncaster street on his way to the sport he loves
+      beyond any other sport. He sat with three other gentlemen on the sidewise
+      seats of the trap, preceded by outriders, which formed the simple turnout
+      of the greatest prince in the world. He was at the end on the right, and
+      he showed fully as stout as he was, in the gray suit he wore, while he
+      lifted his gray top-hat now and then, bowing casually, almost absently, to
+      the spectators fringing, not too deeply, the sidewalks. He was very, very
+      stout, even after many seasons of Marienbad, and after the sufferings he
+      had lately undergone, and he was quite like the pictures and effigies of
+      him, down to those on the postage-stamps. He has a handsome face, still
+      bearded in the midst of a mostly clean-shaving nation, and with the white
+      hairs prevalent on the cheeks and temples; his head is bald atop, though
+      hardly from the uneasiness of wearing a crown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was difficult to realize him for what he was, and in the unmilitary
+      keeping of a few policemen, he was not of the high histrionic presence
+      that those German majesties were. The good-natured crowd did not strain
+      itself in cheering, though it seemed to cheer cordially; and it did not
+      stay long after the trap tooled comfortably away. I then addressed myself
+      to a little knot of railway servants who lingered talking, and asked them
+      what some carriages were still waiting for at the door of the station, and
+      one of them answered with a lightness you do not expect in England,
+      &ldquo;Oh, Lord This, and Lady That, and the Hon. Mr. I-don&rsquo;t-know-what&rsquo;s-his-name.&rdquo;
+      The others laughed at this ribald satire of the upper classes, and I
+      thought it safer to follow the King to the races lest I should hear worse
+      things of them.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The races were some miles away, and when we got to the tracks we did not
+      find their keeping very different from that of the Saratoga tracks,
+      although the crowd was both smarter and shabbier, and it had got to the
+      place through a town of tents and sheds, and a population of hucksters and
+      peddlers, giving an effect of permanency to the festivity such as a
+      solemnity of ours seldom has. When we bought our tickets we found, in the
+      familiarity with the event expected of us, that there was no one to show
+      us to our places; but by dint of asking we got to the Grand Stand, and
+      mounted to our seats, which, when we stood up from them, commanded a
+      wholly satisfactory prospect of the whole field.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know the dimensions of the Doncaster track, or how far they
+      exceed those of the Saratoga track. Possibly one does not do its extent
+      justice because there is no track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a
+      green turf, with a certain course railed off on it. I hope the reader will
+      be as much surprised as I was to realize that the sport of horse-racing in
+      England gets its name of Turf from the fact that the races are run on the
+      grass, and not on the bare ground, as with us. We call the sport the Turf,
+      too, but that is because in this, as in so many other things, we lack
+      incentive and invention, and are fondly colonial and imitative; we ought
+      to call it the Dirt, for that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the
+      racing lacks the definition in England which our course gives, and when it
+      began, I missed the relief into which our track throws the bird-like sweep
+      of the horses as they skim the naked earth in the distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances the
+      thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so
+      scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the
+      shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so much
+      gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The crowd
+      thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see, and
+      bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with the
+      shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the
+      book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here.
+      With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins; but
+      I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at the
+      Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the horse
+      next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty close. By the
+      end of the third or how far they exceed those of the Saratoga track.
+      Possibly one does not do its extent justice because there is no track at
+      Doncaster: there is nothing but a green turf, with a certain course railed
+      off on it. I hope the reader will be as much surprised as I was to realize
+      that the sport of horse-racing in England gets its name of Turf from the
+      fact that the races are run on the grass, and not on the bare ground, as
+      with us. We call the sport the Turf, too, but that is because in this, as
+      in so many other things, we lack incentive and invention, and are fondly
+      colonial and imitative; we ought to call it the Dirt, for that is what it
+      is with us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the definition in England
+      which our course gives, and when it began, I missed the relief into which
+      our track throws the bird-like sweep of the horses as they skim the naked
+      earth in the distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances the
+      thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so
+      scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the
+      shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so much
+      gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The crowd
+      thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see, and
+      bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with the
+      shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the
+      book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here.
+      With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins; but
+      I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at the
+      Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the horse
+      next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty close. By the
+      end of the third race he had softened into something like confidence
+      toward me; certainly into conversability; such was the effect of my being
+      a dead-game sport, or looking it. But how account for the trustfulness of
+      the young woman on my other hand who wore her gold watch outside her
+      dress, and who turned to the elderly stranger for sympathy in a certain
+      supreme moment? This was when the crowd below crumpled suddenly together
+      like the crushing of paper and the sense of something tragically
+      mysterious in the distance clarified itself as the death of one of the
+      horses. It had dropped from heart-break in its tracks, as if shot, and
+      presently a string of young men and boys came dragging to some <i>spoliarium</i>
+      the long, slender body of the pretty creature over the turf which its
+      hoofs had beaten a moment before. Then it was that the girl, with the
+      watch on her breast, turned and asked, &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it sad?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0132}.jpg" alt="{0132}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0132}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      She was probably not the daughter of a hundred earls, but there must have
+      been some such far-descended fair among the ladies who showed themselves
+      from time to time in the royal paddock across a little space from our
+      Grand Stand. The enclosure has no doubt a more technical name, which I
+      would call it by if I knew it, for I do not wish to be irreverent; but
+      paddock is very sporty, and it must serve my occasion. The King never
+      showed himself there at all, though much craned round for and eagerly
+      expected. But ladies and gentlemen moved about in the close, and stood and
+      talked together; very tall people, very easily straight and well set up,
+      very handsome, and very amiable-looking; they may have been really kind
+      and good, or they may have looked so to please the King and keep his
+      spirits up. I did not then, but I do now, realize that these were
+      courtiers, such as one has always read of, and were of very historical
+      quality in their attendance on the monarch. I trust it will not take from
+      the dignity of the fact if I note that several of the courtiers wore derby
+      hats, and one was in a sack coat and a topper. I am not sure what the
+      fairer reader will think if I tell that one of the ladies had on a dress
+      with a white body and crimson skirt and sleeves, and a vast black
+      picture-hat, and wore it with a charming air of authority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The weather, in the excitement of the races, had not known whether it was
+      raining or not, but we feared its absent-mindedness, and at the end of the
+      third race we went away. It is not well to trust an English day too far;
+      this had begun with brilliant sunshine, but it dimmed as it wore on, and
+      we could not know that it was keeping for us the surprise of a very
+      refined sunset. My memory does not serve as to just how we had got out to
+      the race-ground; I think, from our being set down at the very gate, that
+      it was by hansom or by fly; but now we promised ourselves to walk back to
+      town. We did not actually do so; we went back most of the way by tram; but
+      we were the firmer about walking at the outset, because we presently found
+      ourselves in a lane of gypsy tents, where there was an alluring sight and
+      smell of frying fish and potatoes. In the midst of the refection, you
+      could have your fortune told, very favorably, for a very little money. All
+      up and down this happy avenue there went girls of several dozen sizes and
+      ages, crying a particular kind of taffy, proper to the day and place, and
+      never to be had on any other day in any other place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had an hour before train-time, and we thought we would go and see the
+      Parish Church of Doncaster, which we had read was worth seeing. Our belief
+      was confirmed by a group of disappointed ladies in the churchyard, who
+      said it was a most beautiful church inside, but that they had not seen it
+      because it was shut. We proved the fact by trying the door, and then we
+      came away consoling ourselves with the scoff that it was probably closed
+      for the races. At the bookseller&rsquo;s, where we stopped to buy some
+      photographs of the interior of the church we had not seen, we lamented our
+      disappointment, and the salesman said, &ldquo;Perhaps it was closed for
+      the races.&rdquo; So our joke seemed to turn earnest, and on reflection it
+      did not surprise us in that England of close-knit unities where people and
+      prince are of one texture in their pleasures and devotions, and the Church
+      is hardly more national than the Turf.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      At Durham, which was my next excursion from York, I cannot claim,
+      therefore, that my mission was more serious because it almost solely
+      concerned the Church, or that it was more frivolous at Doncaster, where it
+      almost solely concerned the Turf. My train started in a fine mist that
+      turned to sun, but not before it had shown me with the local color, which
+      a gray light lends everything, a pack of hounds crossing a field near the
+      track with two huntsmen at their heels. They were not chasing, but running
+      leisurely, and with their flower-like, loose spread over the green, and
+      the pink-coated hunters on their brown mounts, they afforded a picture as
+      vivid and of as perfect semblance to all my visions of fox-hunting as I
+      could have asked. I had been hoping that I might see something of the
+      famous sport, almost as English as the Church or the Turf, and there,
+      suddenly and all unexpectedly, the sight fully and satisfyingly was. Now,
+      indeed, I felt that my impression of English society was complete, and
+      that I might go home and write novels of English high life, and do
+      something to redeem myself a little from the disgrace I had fallen into
+      with my fellow-plebeians by always writing of common Americans, like
+      themselves, and never <i>grandes dames</i> or ideal persons, or people in
+      the best society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I did not want to go home at once, or turn back from going to Durham
+      through that pleasant landscape, where the mist hung between the trees
+      which seemed themselves only heavier bulks of mist. The wheat in some of
+      the fields was still uncut, and in others, where it had been gathered into
+      sheaves, the rooks by hundreds were noisily gleaning in the track of the
+      reapers. From this conventionally English keeping, I passed suddenly to
+      the sight of the gaunt, dry, gravelly bed of a wide river, such as I had
+      known in Central Italy, or the Middle West at home; and I realized once
+      again that England is no island of one simple complexion, but is a
+      condensed continent, with all continental varieties of feature in it. You
+      must cover thousands and thousands of miles in our tedious lengths and
+      breadths for the beauties and sublimities of scenery which you shall
+      gather from fewer hundreds in England; I have no doubt they have even
+      volcanoes there, but I did not see any, probably because the English are
+      so reticent, and hate to make a display of any sort.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It is because they are so, or possibly because of my ignorance, that I did
+      not know or at all imagine how magnificent the Cathedral of Durham is, or
+      what a matchless seat it has on the bluffs of the river, with depths of
+      woods below its front, tossing in the rich chill of the September wind. As
+      it takes flight for the heavens, to which its business is to invite the
+      thought, it seems to carry the earth with it, for if you climb those noble
+      heights, you find your feet still on the ground, in a most stately space
+      of open level between the cathedral and its neighbor castle, which alone
+      could be worthy of its high company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The castle is Tudor, but the cathedral is beyond all other English
+      cathedrals, I believe, Norman, though to the naked eye it looks so Gothic,
+      and probably is. Here I will leave the reader with any pictures or
+      memories of it which he happens to have, for I have always held it a sin
+      to try describing architecture, or if not a sin, a bore. What chiefly
+      remains to me of my impression of Durham Cathedral is, strangely enough,
+      an objection: I did not like those decorated pillars, alternating with the
+      clustered columns of the interior, and I do not suppose I ever shall: the
+      spiral furrows, the zigzag and lozenge figures chiselled in their
+      surfaces, weakened them to the eye and seemed to trifle with their proud
+      bulk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But to the castle of Durham I have no objection whatever. I should like to
+      live in it, as I should in all other Tudor houses, great or small, that I
+      saw, where, as I am constantly saying, a high ideal of comfort is
+      realized. It is almost as nobly placed as the cathedral, and it is
+      approached by a very stately courtyard, of like spacious effect with the
+      cathedral piazza. Inside it there is a kitchen of the sixteenth century,
+      with a company of neat serving-maids, too comely and young to be, perhaps,
+      of the same period, that gives the tourist a high sense of the luxury in
+      which the Bishop of Durham and the Judges of the Assize Courts live when
+      they are residents in the castle. One sees their apartments, dim and rich,
+      and darkly furnished, but not gloomily, both where they sleep and where
+      they eat, and flatteringly envies them in a willingness for the moment to
+      be a judge or a bishop for the sake of such a fit setting. There is also a
+      fine crypt, with a fine dining-hall and a black staircase of ancient oak,
+      and a gallery with classic busts, and other pictures worthy of wonder, let
+      alone a history from the time of William the Conqueror, who first fancied
+      a castle where it stands, down to the present day. The memory of such
+      successive guests as the Empress Matilda and Henry II. her son, King John,
+      Henry III., Edwards I., II., and III., Queen Philippa, Henry VI., and
+      James I., and Charles I., and Edward VII., abides in the guidebook, and
+      may be summoned from its page to the chambers of the beautiful old place
+      by any traveller intending impressions for literary use from a medieval
+      environment in perfect repair.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      One must be hard to satisfy if one is not satisfied with Durham Castle,
+      and its interior contented me as fully as the exterior of the Cathedral. I
+      went a walk, after leaving the castle, for a further feast of the
+      Cathedral from the paths along the shelving banks of the beautiful Weare.
+      There, at a certain point, I met a studious-looking gentleman who I am
+      sure must have been a professor of Durham University hard by; and I asked
+      him, with due entreaty for pardon, &ldquo;What river was that.&rdquo; He
+      quelled the surprise he must have felt at my ignorance and answered
+      gently, &ldquo;The Weare.&rdquo; &ldquo;Ah, to be sure! The Weare,&rdquo;
+      I said, and thanked him, and longed for more talk with him, but felt
+      myself so unworthy that I had not the face to prompt him further. He
+      passed, and then I met a man much more of my own kind, if not probably so
+      little informed. That rich, chill gale was still tossing and buffeting the
+      tree tops, and he made occasion of this to say, &ldquo;This is a cold wynd
+      a-blowin&rsquo;, Mister.&rdquo; &ldquo;It is, rather,&rdquo; I assented.
+      &ldquo;I was think-in&rsquo;,&rdquo; he observed from an apparent
+      generalization, &ldquo;that I wished I was at home.&rdquo; Then he
+      suddenly added, &ldquo;Help a poor man!&rdquo; I was not wholly surprised
+      at the climax, and I offered him, provisionally, a penny. &ldquo;Will that
+      do?&rdquo; He hesitated perceptibly; then he allowed, with a subtle
+      reluctance, &ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;ll do,&rdquo; and so passed on to
+      satisfy, I hope, the wish he thought he had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0140}.jpg" alt="{0140}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0140}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      I pursued my own course, as far as the bridge which spans the Weare near a
+      most picturesque mill, and then I stopped a kindly-looking workman and
+      asked him whether he thought I could find a fly or cab anywhere near that
+      would take me into the town. He answered, briefly but consistently with
+      his looks, &ldquo;Ah doot,&rdquo; and as he owned that it was a long way
+      to town, I let his doubt decide me to go back to the station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt that I ought to have driven from there into the town, and seen it,
+      and taken to York a later train than the one I had in mind. In the
+      depravity induced by my neglect of this plain duty, I went, with my third
+      class return ticket conscious in my pocket, into the first class
+      refreshment room, and had tea there, as if I had been gentry at the very
+      least, and possibly nobility. Then, having a good deal of time still on my
+      hands, I loitered over the book-stall of the station, and stole a passage
+      of conversation with a kindly clergyman whom I found looking at the pretty
+      shilling editions filling the cases. I said, How nice it was to have
+      Hazlitt in that green cloth; and he said, Yes, but he held for Gibbon in
+      leather; and just then his train came in and he ran off to it, and left me
+      to my guilt in not having gone to see Durham. It was now twilight, and too
+      late; but there the charming old town still is, and will long remain, I
+      hope, with its many memories of war and peace, for whoever will visit it.
+      Certainly there had been no lack of adventures in my ample hour. It was as
+      charming to weave my conjectures, about the two gentlemen with whom I had
+      so barely spoken, as to have carried my acquaintance with them further,
+      and I cannot see how it would have profited me to know more even of that
+      fellow-man who, in the cold wynd a-blowing, had just been thinking he
+      wished he was at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was fit that on our way to Boston we should pause in passing through
+      Cambridge. That was quite as we should have done at home, and I can only
+      wish now that we had paused longer, though every moment that kept us from
+      Boston, if it had been anywhere but in England, would have been a loss.
+      There, it was all gain, and all joy, the gay September 24th that we went
+      this divine journey. My companion was that companionable archaeologist who
+      had guided my steps in search of the American origins in London, and who
+      was now to help me follow the Pilgrim Fathers over the ground where they
+      sojourned when they were only the Pilgrim Sons. At divers places on the
+      way, after we left London, he pointed out some scene associated with
+      American saints or heroes. We traversed the region that George William
+      Curtis&rsquo; people came from, hard by Roxburgh, and Eliot&rsquo;s, the
+      Apostle to the Indians; again we skirted the Ralph Waldo Emerson country,
+      with its big market town of Bishop&rsquo;s Stortford; and beyond Ely,
+      where we stopped for the Cathedral and a luncheon, not unworthy of it, at
+      the station, he startled me from a pleasant drowse I had fallen into in
+      our railway carriage, with the cry: &ldquo;There! That is where Captain
+      John Smith was born.&rdquo; &ldquo;Where? Where?&rdquo; I implored too
+      late, looking round the compartment everywhere. &ldquo;Back where those
+      chickens were.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      That was the nearest I came to seeing one of the most famous Virginian
+      origins. But you cannot see everything in England; there are too many
+      things; and if the truth must be known I cared more for the natural
+      features than the historical facts of the landscape. The country was flat,
+      and a raw green, as it should be in that raw air, under that dun sky, with
+      sheep hardily biting the short tough pasturage under the imbrowning oaks
+      and elms, and the olive-graying willows, beside the full, still streams
+      scarce wetter than the ground they dreamed through.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We did not reach Boston until six o&rsquo;clock, when the day was already
+      waning, and the Stump of St. Botolph&rsquo;s Church stood dim against the
+      sky. It was a long drive through the suburban streets from the station to
+      the hotel, which we found full, and which with its crazy floors touched
+      the fancy as full of something besides guests. But it was well for us so,
+      because across the market-place, which forms the chief public square of
+      Boston, was a far better hotel, where we were welcomed to the
+      old-fashioned ideal of the English inn, such as I did not so nearly
+      realize anywhere else. The ideal was a little impaired by the electric
+      light in our bedrooms, but it was not a very brilliant electric light, and
+      there was a damp cold in the corridors which allowed no doubt of its
+      genuineness. In the dining-room, which was also the reading-room, there
+      was an admirable image of a fire in the grate, and a prevailing warmth and
+      brightness which cheered the heart of exile. When we presently had dinner,
+      specialized for us by certain differences from that of two other
+      travellers, there seemed nothing more to ask, except the conversation of
+      our companions, and this we duly had, quite as if we were four wayfarers
+      met there in a book. One of these gentlemen proved a solicitor from Bath,
+      and that made me feel more at home, knowing and loving Bath as I did. It
+      did not matter that in trying for some mutual acquaintance there we
+      failed; our good-will was everything; and the solicitor was intelligent
+      and agreeable. The other gentleman, tall, dark, of urbane stateliness, was
+      something more, in the touch of Oriental suavity which, more than his
+      nose, betrayed him; and it appeared, in delightful suggestion of the
+      old-time commercial intimacy of the Dutch and English coasts, that he was
+      from Holland, and next morning at breakfast he developed a large valise,
+      which I now think held samples. If he was a Dutch Jew, he was probably a
+      Spanish Jew by descent, and what will the difficult reader have more, in
+      the materials for his romance? Did we gather about the grate after we had
+      done dinner, and each tell the story of his life, or at least the most
+      remarkable thing that had ever happened to him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0148}.jpg" alt="{0148}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0148}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      I cannot say, but I remember that my friend and I, in my instant hunger
+      for Boston, which was greater than my hunger for dinner, set forth while
+      the meal was preparing, and visited the Church of St. Botolph. To reach it
+      we had to pass through the greater length of the market-place, one of the
+      most picturesque in England, and the worthy ancestress of Faneuil Hall and
+      Quincy market-places, which are the most picturesque in America. At one
+      side of its triangle is the birthplace and dwelling of Jean Ingelow, and
+      at the point nearest the church is the statue of Herbert Ingram, the less
+      famous but more locally recognized Bostonian, who founded the <i>Illustrated
+      London News</i> with the money he made by the invention and sale of Old
+      Parr&rsquo;s Pills. He was thrice sent to Parliament from his native town,
+      and he related it to America, after two centuries, by drowning in Lake
+      Michigan. &ldquo;R. N.,&rdquo; the otherwise anonymous author of a very
+      intelligent and agreeable <i>Handbook of Boston</i>, relates that in his
+      first canvass for Parliament Ingram was opposed by a gentleman who, when
+      he asked the voices of the voters, after the old English fashion, was told
+      by four of them in succession that they were promised &ldquo;to their
+      cousin Ingram,&rdquo; and who thereupon declared that if he had known
+      Ingram &ldquo;was cousin to the whole town&rdquo; he would, never have
+      stood against him. Like the Bostonians of Massachusetts, the Bostonians of
+      Lincolnshire were in fact closely knit together by ties of kinship, owing,
+      &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo; believes, to the isolation of Boston before the
+      draining of its fens, and not to their conviction that there were no
+      outsiders worthy to mate with them.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The house where the martyrologist John Fox first saw the light was
+      replaced long ago by a famous old inn, pulled down in its turn; but the
+      many and many Americans who visit Boston may still visit the house where
+      Jean Ingelow was born. Whether they may see more than the outside of it I
+      do not know from experiment or even inquiry. &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo; will say
+      nothing of her but that she was born, and that her father was a banker;
+      perhaps he thinks that she has spoken sufficiently for herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0152}.jpg" alt="{0152}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0152}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      The air of the market-place, as we crossed to the church, was of a
+      pleasant bleakness, and the Witham was coldly washing under the wall which
+      keeps St. Botolph from it. In the dimness we could have only a conjecture
+      of the church&rsquo;s outward beauty, and of the grandeur of the tower
+      climbing into the evening, where it has hailed so many myriads of moving
+      ships, and beckoned them to safety. But within, where it was already
+      night, the church was cheerfully luminous with Welsbach lights, which
+      showed it all wreathed and garlanded for a harvest festival, began the day
+      before, and to be concluded now with some fit religious observance. The
+      blossoms and leaves were a little wilted and withered, but the fruits and
+      vegetables were there in sturdy endurance, and together they swathed the
+      pulpit from which John Cotton used to preach, and all but hid its
+      structure from view, like flowers of rhetoric softening some hard
+      doctrine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apparently, however, Cotton&rsquo;s doctrine was not anywise too hard, or
+      even hard enough, for such &ldquo;a factious people, who were imbued with
+      the Puritan spirit,&rdquo; as he found in Boston, when he was first
+      elected vicar of St. Botolph&rsquo;s; and it was not till Archbishop Laud&rsquo;s
+      ecclesiastical tyrannies began that he came to see &ldquo;the Sin of
+      Conformity&rdquo; and to preach resistance. His conflict with the
+      authorities went so far that exile to another Boston in another hemisphere
+      became his only hope. Or, as Lord Dorset intimated, &ldquo;if he had been
+      guilty of drunkenness, uncleanness, or any lesser fault, he could have
+      obtained his pardon, but as he was guilty of Puritanism, and
+      Non-conformity, the crime was non-pardonable; and therefore he advised him
+      to flee for his safety.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cotton Chapel, so called, was restored mainly with moneys received
+      from Cotton&rsquo;s posterity, lineal or lateral, in his city of refuge
+      overseas, and &ldquo;the corbels that support the timbered ceiling are
+      carved with the arms of certain of the early colonists of New England.&rdquo;
+      Edward Everett, one of Cotton&rsquo;s descendants, wrote the dedicatory
+      inscription in Latin, which &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo; has Englished in verse,
+      and I am the more scrupulous to quote it, because, as I must own with my
+      usual reluctant honesty, I quite missed seeing the Cotton Chapel.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     That here John Cotton&rsquo;s memory may survive
+     Where for so long he labored when alive,
+     In James&rsquo; reign and Charles&rsquo;, ere it ceased&mdash;
+     A grave, skilled, learned, earnest parish-priest;
+     Till from the strife that tossed the Church of God
+     He in a new world sought a new abode,
+     To a new England, a new Boston came,
+     (That took, to honor him, that reverend name)
+     Fed the first flock of Christ that gathered there&mdash;
+     Till death deprived it of its shepherd&rsquo;s care&mdash;
+     There well resolved all doubts of mind perplext,
+     Whether with cares of this world or the next;
+     Two centuries five lustra from the year
+     That saw the exile leave his labors here,
+     His family, his townsmen, with delight&mdash;
+     (Whom to the task their English kin invite)&mdash;
+     To the fair fane he served so well of yore,
+     His name, in two worlds honored, thus restore,
+     This chapel renovate, this tablet place,
+     In this, the year of man&rsquo;s recovered Grace,
+                         1855.
+</pre>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I missed most of the other memorable things in the church that night, but
+      I saw fleetingly some of the beautiful tombs for which it is famous; the
+      effigies of the dead lay in their niches, quietly, as if already tucked
+      away for the night, in the secular sleep of the dust beneath. The tombs
+      were more famous than they, and more beautiful, if the faces of some were
+      true likenesses, but after so many centuries one ought not to require even
+      women to be pretty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0156}.jpg" alt="{0156}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0156}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      We had not begun to have enough of Boston yet, and after dinner we went a
+      long walk up the Witham, away from the parapet before the church, under
+      which its deep tides are always washing to and fro. In the dimness, after
+      we had got a little to the outskirts of the town, there seemed shipyards
+      along the river&rsquo;s course, but at one place there was a large
+      building brilliantly lighted, which from certain effects at the windows we
+      decided to be a printing-office on the scale of those in and near our own
+      Boston. What was our shame and grief the next morning to find it was a
+      cigar factory, and to learn that cigar and cigarette making was almost the
+      chief industry of the mother Boston. There are really two large tobacco
+      factories there running overtime, and always advertising for more women
+      and girls to do their work; and in our Boston, not so long ago, smoking in
+      the street was forbidden! Such are the ironies of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What the shipyards had turned into by daylight, I do not now remember. The
+      Witham had turned into a long, deep gash, cut down into the clay twenty
+      feet from the level of the flood tides. We crossed on a penny ferry which
+      the current pushed over in the manner of the earliest ferries, near the
+      tobacco factory, and came back into the heart of the town through streets
+      of low stone houses, with few buildings of note to dignify their course.
+      Small craft lay along the steep muddy shores, and at one place a little
+      excursion steamer was waiting for the tide to come in and float it for the
+      fulfilment of its promise of sailing at ten o&rsquo;clock. We idly longed
+      to make its voyage with it, and if the chance were offering now, I
+      certainly should not forego it as I did then. But when you are in a
+      foreign place, no matter how much you have travelled and how well you know
+      that it will not offer soon again, you reject the most smiling chance
+      because you think you can take it any time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The morning was soft and warm, with a sun shining amiably on the rather
+      commonplace old town. I had risen betimes that I might go and get a
+      Spanish melon for my breakfast, but at eight o&rsquo;clock I found the
+      fruiterer&rsquo;s locked and barred against me. I lingered and hungered
+      for the melons which I saw in his window, and then I tried other
+      fruiterers, but none of them was stirring yet. I reflected how different
+      it would have been in our own Boston; and if it had not been for the
+      market people coming into the square and beginning to dress their stalls
+      with vegetables, and fish, and native fruits, such as hard pears and
+      knotty apples, I do not know how ill I might have come away thinking of
+      that idle mother Boston. In other squares there were cattle for sale
+      later, and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the
+      markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place
+      found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping with
+      the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which, once for
+      all, I must own was not an impressive place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The best thing in it, and the thing you are always coming back to, is the
+      beautiful church, to which we paid a second visit early in the forenoon.
+      We found it where we left it the night before, lifting its tower from the
+      brink of the Witham, and looking far out over the flat land to a sea no
+      flatter. The land seems indeed, like so much English coast, merely the sea
+      come ashore, and turned into fens for the greater convenience of the
+      fishermen, whom, with the deeper sea sailors, we saw about the town,
+      lounging through the crooked streets, and hanging bare-armed upon the
+      parapets of the bridges. Now we found the church had about its foot a
+      population of Bostonians for whom, under their flat gravestones, it had
+      been chiming the quarters from its mellow-throated bells, while the
+      Bostonians on our side had been hustling for liberty, and money, and
+      culture, and all the good things of this world, and getting them in a
+      measure that would astonish their namesakes. Within the church we saw
+      again the beautiful tombs of the night before, and others like them, and
+      again we saw the pulpit of John Cotton, which we could make out a little
+      better than at first, because its garlands were a little more withered and
+      shrunken away. But better than either we realized the perfection of the
+      church interior as a whole, so ample, so simple, such a comfortable and
+      just sufficient eyeful.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      From other interests in St. Botolph&rsquo;s you somehow keep always, or
+      finally, coming to the Stump, as the tower is called somewhat in the humor
+      of our Boston. It is not so fair within as without; that could not be in
+      the nature of things; and yet the interior of the tower has a claim upon
+      the spectator&rsquo;s wonder, if not his admiration, which, so far as I
+      know, the interior of no other tower has. It is all treated as a loftier
+      room of the church, and its ceiling, a hundred and fifty feet from the
+      ground, is elaborately and allegorically groined. The work was done when
+      the whole church was restored about half a century ago, and has not the
+      claim of medieval whim upon the fancy. Not so much pleasure as he might
+      wish mingles with the marvel of the beholder, who carries a crick in the
+      neck away from the sight, and yet once, but not more, in a way, it is
+      worth while to have had the sight. Certainly this treatment of the tower
+      is unique; there is nothing to compare with it in Boston, Massachusetts,
+      and cannot be even when the interior of the Old South is groined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we came out of the church, we found the weather amusing itself as
+      usual in England, raining with wind, then blowing without rain, and
+      presently, but by no means decisively, sunning without either wind or
+      rain. The conditions were favorable to a further exploration of the town,
+      which seemed to have a passion for old cannon, and for sticking them about
+      in all sorts of odd nooks and corners. We found one smaller piece over a
+      gateway, which we were forbidden by a sign-board to enter on pain of
+      prosecution for trespassing. There was nothing else to prevent our
+      entering, and we went in, to find ourselves in an alley with nothing but a
+      Gypsy van in it. Nothing but a Gypsy van! As if that were not the
+      potentiality of all manner of wild romance! Whether the alley belonged to
+      Gypsies, or the Gypsies had trespassed by leaving their van in it, I shall
+      now probably never know, but I commend the inquiry to any reader of mine
+      whom these pages shall inspire to repeat our pilgrimage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0162}.jpg" alt="{0162}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0162}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      There was no great token of genteel life in Boston, so far as we saw it,
+      but perhaps we did not look in the right places. There were good shops,
+      but not fine or large ones, and I am able to report of the intellectual
+      status that there are three weekly newspapers, but no dailies, which could
+      not be the case in any American town of fourteen thousand people.
+      Concerning society, I can only say that in our wanderings we came at one
+      point on a vast, high-walled, iron-gated garden, which looked as if it
+      might have society beyond it, but not being positively forbidden we did
+      not penetrate it. We did indeed visit the ancient grammar-school, one of
+      those foundations which in England were meant originally for the poor
+      deserving of scholarship, but which have nearly all lapsed to the more
+      deserving rich, careful of the contamination of the lower classes. Being
+      out of term the school was closed to its pupils, but we found a contractor
+      there removing the old stoves and putting in a system of hot-water
+      heating, which he said was better fitted to resist the cold of the Boston
+      winters. He was not a very conversable man, but so much we screwed out of
+      him, with the added fact that the tuition of that school was no longer
+      free. It came to some five guineas a year, no great sum, but perhaps
+      sufficient to keep the school, with the other influences, select enough
+      for the patronage to which it had fallen. It was a pleasant place, with a
+      playground before it, which in the course of generations there must have
+      been a good deal of schoolboy fun got out of.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There remained for us now only the Guildhall to visit, and we had left
+      that to the last because it was the thing that had mostly brought us to
+      Boston. It was the scene of the trial and imprisonment of those poor
+      people of the region roundabout who were trying to escape from their
+      &ldquo;dread lord,&rdquo; James the First, and were arrested for this
+      crime, and brought to answer for it before the magistrates of the town.
+      Their dread lord had then lately met some ministers of their faith at
+      Hampton Court, and there browbeaten, if not beaten, them in argument, so
+      that he was in no humor to let, these people, who afterward became the
+      Pilgrim Fathers, get away to Holland, where there was no dread lord, or at
+      least none of King James&rsquo; thinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But no words can be so good to tell of all this as the words of Governor
+      Bradford in his <i>Historie of Plymouth Plantation</i>, where he says that
+      &ldquo;ther was a large companie of them purposed to get passage at Boston
+      in Lincolnshire, and for that end had hired a shipe wholy to them selves,
+      &amp; made agreement with the maister to be ready at a certaine day, and
+      take them and their goods in, at a conveniente place, wher they
+      accordingly would all attende in readiness. So after long waiting, &amp;
+      large expences, though he kepte not day with them, yet he came at length
+      &amp; tooke them in, in the night. But when he had them &amp; their goods
+      abord, he betrayed them, haveing before hand complotted with the serchers
+      &amp; other officers so to doe; who tooke them, and put them into open
+      boats, &amp; ther rifled and ransaked them, searching them to their shirts
+      for money, yea even the women furder then became modestie; and then caried
+      them back into the towne, &amp; made them a spectakle &amp; wonder to the
+      multitude, which came flocking on all sides to behould them. Being thus
+      first, by the catchpoule officer, rifled, &amp; stripte of their money,
+      books, and much other goods, they were presented to the magistrates, and
+      messengers sente to informe the lords of the Counsell of them; and so they
+      were comited to ward. Indeed the magistrats used them courteously, and
+      shewed them what favour they could; but could not deliver them till order
+      came from the Counsell-table. But the issue was that after a months
+      imprisonmente, the greatest parte were dismiste, &amp; sent to the places
+      from whence they came; but 7. of the principall were still kept in prison,
+      and bound over to the Assises.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My excellent &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo; of the <i>Handbook of Boston</i> is
+      anxious to have his reader, as I in turn am anxious to have mine,
+      distinguish between these future Pilgrim Fathers and the gentlemen and
+      scholars who later founded Boston in Massachusetts Bay, and called its
+      name after that of the town they had dwelt in or often visited before they
+      left the handsome keeping of the gentler life of Lincolnshire. Such were
+      Richard Bellingham, Edmund Quincy, Thomas Leverett, John Cotton, Samuel
+      Whiting, and others, known to our colonial and national history. Not even
+      Bradford or Brewster, afterward dignified figures in Plymouth colony, were
+      of the humble band, men, women, and children, that the officers of Boston
+      took from their vessel. &ldquo;Pathetic but splendid figures,&rdquo; my
+      brave &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo; calls them, and he tells how, after a month&rsquo;s
+      jail, they were &ldquo;sent home broken men, to endure the scoffs of their
+      neighbors and the rigors of ecclesiastical discipline.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The dungeons which remain to witness of their hardships in Boston are of
+      thick-walled, iron-grated stone, and the captives were fed on bread and
+      water within smell of the roasting and broiling of the Guildhall kitchens
+      immediately beside them. I will not conjecture with &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo;
+      that they were put there &ldquo;by a refinement of cruelty,&rdquo; so that
+      they might suffer the more in that vicinage. &ldquo;The magistrates&rdquo;
+      who had &ldquo;used them courteously and shewed them what favour they
+      could,&rdquo; would not have willed that; but perhaps &ldquo;the
+      Counsell-table&rdquo; did; and it was certainly a hardship that the
+      dungeons and the kitchens were so close together, as any man may see at
+      this day. Neither the dungeons nor the kitchens are any longer used; the
+      spits and grates are rusted where the fires blazed, and the cells where
+      the Pilgrims suffered are now full of large earthen jars. For no other or
+      better reason, the large open spaces of the basement outside of them were
+      scattered about with agricultural implements, ploughs, harrows, and the
+      like. It was the belief of my companion, founded on I know not what fact,
+      that the hall in which the Pilgrims were tried was a large upper chamber
+      which we found occupied by a boys&rsquo; school. The door stood partly
+      ajar, and we could see the master within walking up and down before some
+      twenty boys, as if waiting for one of them to answer some question he had
+      put them. Perhaps it was a question of local history, for none of them
+      seemed able to answer it; presently when a boy came out on some errand,
+      and we stopped him, and asked him where it was the Pilgrims had been
+      tried, he did not know, and apparently he had never heard of the Pilgrims.
+      He was a very nice-looking boy, and otherwise not unintelligent; certainly
+      he was well-mannered, as nice-looking English boys are apt to be with
+      their elders; perhaps he had heard too much of the Pilgrims, and had
+      purposely forgotten them. This might very well have happened in a place
+      like Boston where such hordes of Americans are coming every year, and
+      asking so many hard questions concerning an incident of local history not
+      wholly creditable to the place. He could justly have said that the same or
+      worse might have happened to the Pilgrims anywhere else in England, under
+      the dread lord there then was, and in fact something of the same hardship
+      did befall them afterward at the place a little northeast of Boston, which
+      we were now to visit for their piteous sake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The nexte spring after,&rdquo; as Bradford continues the narrative
+      of their sorrows, &ldquo;ther was another attempte made by some of these
+      &amp; others, to get over at an other place. And so it fell out, that they
+      light of a Dutchman at Hull, having a ship of his owne belonging to
+      Zealand; they made agreements with him, and acquainted him with their
+      condition, hoping to find more faithfullnes in him, then in the former of
+      their owne nation. He bad them not fear, for he would doe well enough. He
+      was by appointment to take them in betweene Grimsbe &amp; Hull, where was
+      a large comone a good way distante from any towne. Now against the
+      prefixed time, the women &amp; children, with the goods, were sent to the
+      place in a small barke, which they had hired for that end; and the men
+      were to meete them by land. But it so fell out, that they were ther a day
+      before the shipe came, and the sea being rough, and the women very sicke,
+      prevailed with the seamen to put into a creeke hardby, wher they lay on
+      ground at lowwater. The nexte morning the shipe came, but they were fast,
+      &amp; could not stir till about noone. In the mean time, the shipe
+      maister, perceiveing how the matter was, sente his boate to be getting the
+      men abord whom he saw ready, walking aboute the shore. But after the first
+      boat full was gott abord, &amp; she was ready to goe for more, the Mr.
+      espied a greate company, both horse &amp; foote, with bills, &amp; gunes,
+      &amp; other weapons; for the countrie was raised to take them. The
+      Dutchman seeing this swore his countries oath, &lsquo;sacremente,&rsquo;
+      and having the wind faire, waiged his Ancor, hoysed sayles, &amp; away.
+      But the poore men which were gott abord, were in great distress for their
+      wives and children, which they saw thus to be taken, and were left
+      destitute of their helps; and them selves also, not having a cloath to
+      shifte them with, more then they had on their baks, &amp; some scarce a
+      peney aboute them, all they had being abord the barke. It drew tears from
+      their eyes, and any thing they had they would have given to have been a
+      shore againe; but all in vaine, ther was no remedy, they must thus sadly
+      part. The rest of the men there were in greatest danger, made shift to
+      escape away before the troope could surprise them: those only staying that
+      best might, to be assistante unto the women. But pitifull it was to see
+      the heavie case of these poore women in this distress: what weeping &amp;
+      crying on every side, some for their husbands, that were carried away in
+      the ship as is before related; others not knowing what should become of
+      them, &amp; their little ones; others again melted in teares, seeing their
+      poore little ones hanging aboute them, crying for feare, and quaking with
+      could. Being thus aprehanded, they hurried from one place to another, and
+      from one justice to another, till in the ende they knew not what to doe
+      with them; for to imprison so many women &amp; innocent children for no
+      other cause (many of them) but that they must goo with their husbands,
+      seemed to be unreasonable and all would crie out of them; and to send them
+      home againe was as difficult, for they aleged, as the trueth was, they had
+      no homes to goe to, for they had either sould, or otherwise disposed of
+      their houses &amp; livings. To be shorte, after they had been thus
+      turmoyled a good while, and conveyed from one constable to another, they
+      were glad to be ridd of them in the end upon any termes: for all were
+      wearied &amp; tired with them. Though in the mean time they (poore soules)
+      indured miserie enough; and thus in the end necessitie forste a way for
+      them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      If there is any more touching incident in the history of man&rsquo;s
+      inhumanity to man, I do not know it, or cannot now recall it; and it was
+      to visit the scene of it near &ldquo;Grimsbe,&rdquo; or Great Grimsby, as
+      it is now called, that we set out, after viewing their prison in Boston,
+      over wide plains, with flights of windmills alighted on them everywhere.
+      Here and there one seemed to have had its wings clipped, and we were told
+      by a brighter young fellow than we often had for a travelling companion
+      that this was because steam had been put into it as a motive power more
+      constant than wind, even on that wind-swept coast. There seems to have
+      been nothing else, so far as my note-book witnesses, to take up our
+      thoughts in the short run to Great Grimsby, and for all I know now I may
+      have drowsed by many chicken-yards marking the birthplace of our
+      discoverers and founders. We got to Great Grimsby in time for a very
+      lamentable lunch in a hostelry near the station, kept, I think, for such
+      &ldquo;poore people&rdquo; as the Pilgrims were, with stomachs not easily
+      turned by smeary marble table-tops with a smeary maid having to take their
+      orders, and her ineffective napkin in her hand. The honesty as well as the
+      poverty of the place was attested, when, returning to recover a forgotten
+      umbrella, we were met at the door by this good girl, who had left her bar
+      to fetch it in anticipation of all question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Great Grimsby, it seemed, there was no vehicle but a very exceptional
+      kind of cab,&mdash;looking like a herdic turned wrongside fore, and unable
+      to orient itself aright,&mdash;available for the long drive to that
+      &ldquo;large comone a good way distante from any towne,&rdquo; which we
+      were to make, if we wished to visit the scene of the Pilgrims&rsquo;
+      sufferings in their second attempt to escape from their dread lord. In
+      this strange equipage, therefore, we set out, and nine long miles we drove
+      through a country which seemed to rise with increasing surprise at us and
+      our turnout on each inquiry we made for the way from chance passers. Just
+      beyond the suburbs of the town we entered the region of a vast, evil smell
+      which we verified as that of the decaying fish spread upon the fields, for
+      a fertilizer after they had missed their market in that great fishing
+      centre. Otherwise the landscape was much the ordinary English landscape of
+      the flatter parts, but wilder and rougher than in the south or west, and
+      constantly growing more so as we drove on and on. Our cabman kept a good
+      courage, as long as the highway showed signs of much travel, but when it
+      began to falter away into a country road, he must have lost faith in our
+      sanity, though he kept an effect of the conventional respect for his
+      nominal betters which English cabmen never part with except in a dispute
+      about fares and distances. We stayed him as well as we could with some
+      grapes and pears, which we found we did not want after our lunch, and
+      which we handed him up through his little trap-door, but a plaintive
+      quaver grew into his voice, and he let his horse lag in the misgiving
+      which it probably shared with him. Nothing of signal interest occurred in
+      our progress except at one point, near a Methodist chapel, where we caught
+      sight of a gayly painted blue van, lettered over with many texts and
+      mottoes, which my friend explained as one of the vans intinerantly used by
+      extreme Protestants of the Anne Askew persuasion to prevent the spread of
+      Romanism in England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The signs of travel had not only ceased, but a little in front of us the
+      way was barred by a gate, and beyond this gate there was nothing but a
+      sort of savage pasture, with many red and brown cattle in it, gathered
+      questioningly about the barrier, or lifting their heads indifferently from
+      the grass. Just before we reached the gate we passed a peasant&rsquo;s
+      cottage, where he was sociably getting in his winter&rsquo;s coal, and he
+      and his wife and children, and the carter, all leaned upon whatever
+      supports they found next them, and stared at the extraordinary apparition
+      of two, I hope, personable strangers driving in a hansom of extreme type
+      into a cow pasture. But we were not going to give ourselves away to their
+      too probable ignorance by asking if that were the place where the Pilgrims
+      who founded New England were first stopped from going to Holland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My friend dismounted, and opened the gate, and we drove in among the
+      cattle, and after they had satisfied a peaceful curiosity concerning us,
+      they went about their business of eating grass, and we strayed over
+      &ldquo;the large comone,&rdquo; and tried to imagine its looks nearly
+      three hundred years before. They could not have been very different; the
+      place could hardly have been much wilder, and there was the &ldquo;creeke
+      hardby wher they lay,&rdquo; the hapless women and children, in their boat
+      &ldquo;at lowwater,&rdquo; while the evening came on, no doubt, just as it
+      was doing with us, the weather clearing, and the sunset glassy and cold.
+      Off yonder, away across the solitary moor, was the course of the Humber,
+      marked for us by the trail of a steamer&rsquo;s smoke through the fringes
+      of trees, and for them by the sail of the Dutchman, who, when he saw next
+      day that &ldquo;great company, both horse and foote, with bills and gunes,
+      and other weapons,&rdquo; coming to harry those poor people, &ldquo;swore
+      his countries oath, &lsquo;sacremente,&rsquo; and having the wind faire,
+      waiged his ancor, hoysed sails, and away,&rdquo; leaving those desolate
+      women and their little ones lamenting.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      On our way back we stopped at a little country church, so peaceful, so
+      very peaceful, in the evening light, where it stood, withdrawn from the
+      highway, Norman and Gothic without, and within all so sweet and bare and
+      clean, that we could not believe in the old ecclesiasticism which
+      persecuted the Puritans into the exile whither they carried the
+      persecuting spirit with them. A pretty child, a little girl, opened the
+      churchyard gate and held it for us to pass, and her gentleness made me the
+      more question the history of those dreadful days in the past. When I saw a
+      young lady, in the modern dress which I had so often lost my heart to at
+      the Church Parade in Hyde Park, going up a leafy lane, toward the
+      vicarage, from having been for tennis and afternoon tea at some pleasant
+      home in the neighborhood, I denied the atrocious facts altogether. She had
+      such a very charming hat on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The suburbs of Great Grimsby, after you reach them through that zone of
+      bad smell, are rather attractive, and you get into long clean streets of
+      small stone houses, like those of Plymouth or Southampton, and presently
+      you reach the Humber, which is full of the steamers and sail, both fishing
+      and deep sea, of the prosperous port, with great booms of sawlogs from
+      Norway, half filling the channel, and with a fringe of tall chimneys from
+      the sawmills along the shores. Great Grimsby is not only the centre of a
+      vast distributing trade in coal and lumber, but of a still vaster trade in
+      fish. It cuts one&rsquo;s pride, if one has believed that Gloucester,
+      Massachusetts, is the greatest fishing port in the world, to learn that
+      Grimsby, with a hundred more fishing sail, is only &ldquo;<i>one</i> of
+      the principal fishing ports&rdquo; of the United Kingdom. What can one do
+      against those brutal British statistics? We think our towns grow like
+      weeds, but London seems to grow half such a weed as Chicago in a single
+      night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0174}.jpg" alt="{0174}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0174}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      After we were got well into the town, we found ourselves part of an
+      immense bicycle parade, with bicyclers of both sexes on their wheels, in
+      masks and costumes, Pierrots, and Clowns, and Harlequins and Columbines,
+      in a competition for the prettiest and fanciest dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we came to start from the station on our run to London, we reflected
+      that there were a great many of these bicyclers, and that they would
+      probably crowd us in our third-class compartment. So, as we had bought an
+      excellent supper in baskets, such as they send you on the trains
+      everywhere in England, and wished to eat it in quiet, we sought out the
+      guard who was lurking near for the purpose, and bribed him to shut us into
+      that compartment, and not let any one else in. There we remained in
+      darkness, with our curtains drawn, and when, near train-time, the
+      bicyclers began to swarm about the carriages, we heard them demanding
+      admittance to our compartment from our faithful guard, if that is the
+      right way to call him. He turned them away with soft answers, answers so
+      very soft that we could not make out what he said, but he seemed to be
+      inviting them into other compartments, which he doubtless pretended were
+      better. The murmurs would die away, and then rise again, and from time to
+      time we knew that a baffled bicycler was pulling at our door, or vainly
+      bumping against it. We listened with our hearts in our mouths; but no one
+      got in, and the train started, and we opened our baskets and began to eat
+      and to drink, like two aristocrats or plutocrats. What made our inhuman
+      behavior worse was that we were really nothing of the kind, but both
+      professed friends of the common people. The story might show that when it
+      comes to a question of selfishness men are all alike ready to profit by
+      the unjust conditions. However, it must be remembered that those people
+      were only bicyclers. If we could have conceived of them as masses we
+      should have known them for brothers, and let them in, probably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is only some six or seven hours by train from London to Aberystwyth,
+      but if you will look at the names on a map of the Cambrian railways, when
+      you begin the Welsh part of your journey, you will seem to be in a
+      stranger and farther country than that of Prester John. Pwllheli, Cerrig y
+      Drudion, Gwerful Goch, Festiniog, Bryn Eglwys, Llanidloes, Maertwro,
+      Carnedd Fibast, Clynog Fwr, Llan-y-Mawddwy Machynlleth, Duffws, are a few
+      out of the hundred names in the hills or along the valleys, giving the
+      near neighborhood of England an effect of more than mid-Asian remoteness.
+      The eye starts at their look; but if the jaw aches at the thought of
+      pronouncing them, it is our own wilful orthographical usage that is at
+      fault; the words, whose sound the letters faithfully render, are music,
+      and they largely record a Christian civilization which was centuries old
+      when the Saxons came to drive the Britons into the western mountains and
+      to call them strangers in the immemorial home of their race. The Britons
+      of the Roman conquest, who became the Welsh of the baffled Saxon invaders,
+      and are the Cymry of their own history and poetry, still stand five feet
+      four in their stockings, where they have stood from the dawn of time, an
+      inexpugnable host of dark little men, defying the Saeseneg in their
+      unintelligible, imperishable speech.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Of course, except in the loneliest and farthest places, they speak English
+      as well as Welsh; and they misplace their aspirates, which they lost under
+      the Normans as the Saxons did. But this did not happen to them by conquest
+      as it did to the Saxons; they were beguiled of their h&rsquo;s when they
+      were cheated with a Welsh-born prince instead of the Welsh prince they
+      were promised in the succession of their ancient lines. They had been
+      devout Christians, after their manner, in the earliest centuries; as the
+      prefix Llan, or Saint, everywhere testifies, the country abounded in
+      saints, whose sons inherited their saintship; and at the Reformation they
+      became Calvinists as unqualifiedly as their kindred, the Bretons, remained
+      Catholics. They have characterized the English and Americans with their
+      strong traits in a measure which can be dimly traced in the spread of
+      their ten or twenty national names, and they have kept even with the most
+      modern ideals quite to the verge of co-education in their colleges. It is
+      a fact which no Welshman will deny that Cromwell was of Welsh blood.
+      Shakespeare was unquestionably of Welsh origin. Henry VII. was that Welsh
+      Twdwr (or Tudor, as the Saeseneg misspell it), who set aside the
+      Plantagenet succession, and was the grandsire of &ldquo;the great
+      Elizabeth,&rdquo; not to boast of Bloody Mary or Henry VIII. But if these
+      are not enough, there is the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr.
+      Lloyd-George, who is now the chief figure of the English cabinet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bad name which their own half-countryman, Giraldus Cambrensis, gave
+      the Welsh in the twelfth century, clings to them yet in the superstition
+      of all Norman-minded and Saxon-minded men, so that the Englishman I met on
+      the way from Edinburgh was doubtless speaking racially rather than
+      personally when he said that the Welsh were the prize liars of the
+      universe. I for my part heard no lies in Wales except those I told myself;
+      but as I am of Welsh stock, perhaps my experience is not wholly refutive
+      of that Englishman&rsquo;s position. I can only urge further the noted
+      philological fact that the Welsh language is so full of imagery that it is
+      almost impossible to express in it the brute veracities in which the
+      English speech is so apt. Otherwise I should say that nowhere have I been
+      used with a more immediate and constant sincerity than in Wales. The
+      people were polite and they were almost always amiable, but in English, at
+      least, they did not say the thing that was not; and their politeness was
+      without the servile forms from lower to higher which rather weary one in
+      England. They said &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; and &ldquo;No,&rdquo; but as gently
+      as if they had always added &ldquo;Sir.&rdquo; If I have it on my
+      conscience to except from my sweeping praise of sincerity the expressman
+      at Aberystwyth who promised that our baggage should be at our lodgings in
+      an hour, and did not bring it in five, I must add that we arrived on the
+      last day of a great agricultural fair, when even the New York Transfer
+      Company might have given a promise of more than wonted elasticity.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In the station of Aberystwyth there were about three or four thousand
+      Welshmen of the national height, volubly waiting for the trains to bear
+      them away to their farms and villages; but they made way most amiably for
+      the dismounting travellers, who in our case were led through them by the
+      most energetic porter I ever knew. They did not stare down upon us from
+      the unseemly altitude of other national statures, and often during our
+      stay I saw like crowds of civil men in the street markets who were no
+      taller, and sometimes there were women who had not scaled the heights
+      reached by our American girls. They would probably have competed fairly
+      well with these in the courses of the colleges to which the Welsh send
+      their daughters as well as their sons; but I will not pretend that the
+      good looks of either the men or women was of the American average. I
+      cannot even say that these contemporary ancient Britons had the advantage
+      of the toothless English peasantry in the prompt dentistry which is our
+      peculiar blessing. In Great Britain, though I must not say Ireland, for I
+      have never been there, a few staggering incisors seem a formidable
+      equipment of the jaw in lower-class middle life and even tender youth. The
+      difference is a tremendous advantage which, if it does not make for the
+      highest character in us, will doubtless stand us in good stead in any
+      close with the well-toothed Japanese, and when we are beaten, our
+      gold-fillings will go far to pay our indemnity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all those thousands at the station had departed, there were still
+      visitors enough left in Aberystwyth to distend the hotels uncomfortably;
+      and the next morning we set out in the pursuit, always interesting and
+      alluring, of lodgings. The town seemed to be pretty full of lodgings, but
+      as it was the middle of August, and the very height of the season, they
+      were full-up in dismaying measure. We found the only one not kept by a
+      Welsh woman in the ostensible keeping of an Englishwoman, a veteran
+      cockney landlady, but behind her tottering throne reigned a Welsh girl,
+      under whose iron rule we fell as if we had been unworthy Saeseneg instead
+      of Cymric-fetched Americans. We had rejected other lodgings because,
+      though their keepers had promised to provision us, it always appeared that
+      we must go out and do the marketing ourselves. I shall lastingly regret
+      that we did not submit to this condition, for it would have been one of
+      the best means of studying the local life. But we held out for the London
+      custom, and before the Welsh Power, which has so often made itself felt
+      behind English thrones, could intervene, compliance was promised. After
+      that it remained for the Welsh Power to make our stay difficult, and our
+      going easy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0184}.jpg" alt="{0184}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0184}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      Otherwise the place was delightful; it was in almost the centre of the
+      long curve of the Victoria Terrace, with windows that looked down upon the
+      pebbly beach, and over the blue sea to the bluer stretch of the
+      Pembrokeshire hills on the south, and the Carnarvonshire hills on the
+      north, holding the lovely waters in their shadowy embrace. There was not
+      much shipping, and what there was seemed of the pleasure sort that parties
+      go down to the sea to be sick in. The long parade was filled at most hours
+      with the English who make the place their resort; whose bathing began
+      early in the morning and whose flirting continued far into the night, with
+      forenoon and afternoon dawdling and dozing on the pebbles. At one end of
+      the Terrace rose a prodigious headland, whose slope was scaled over with
+      broken slate, like some mammoth heaving from the deep and showing an
+      elephantine hide of bluish gray. At the other end was the Amusement Pier,
+      with the co-educational college, which is part of the University of Wales,
+      and with divers hotels. Somewhat behind and beyond were the ruins of one
+      of those castles which the Normans planted with a mailed fist at every
+      vantage in Wales, as their sole means of holding down the swarming,
+      squirming, fighting little dark people of the country. Even then they
+      could not do it, for the Welsh, often overrun, were never conquered, as
+      they will tell you themselves if you ask them. But Wales is now perhaps
+      the most peaceful country in the world. Its prisons for the most part
+      stand empty (it is said), and the people, once so turbulent, are as little
+      given to violence as to vice. In fact, I once heard a great Welsh scholar
+      declare that in the old times it was not the true Welsh who kept up the
+      fighting, either on the public or the private scale, but the Scotch and
+      Irish who had found a home among them. In any case, it is true that after
+      the Normans had planted their castles in Wales to hold the country, it was
+      all they could do to hold the castles, and not till their enemies had
+      imagined having the English King&rsquo;s son born in one of them did they
+      bring the Welsh under the English crown at last. Even then that uncertain
+      people broke from their allegiance now and again; or the Scotch and Irish
+      among them did.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      All sorts of sights and sounds might be expected on our Terrace, but that
+      which especially warmed the heart of exile in us, and pleased the fancy of
+      other sojourners was the appearance, one evening, of a stately band of
+      tall men in evening dress and top-hats, with musical instruments in their
+      grasp, and heads lifted high above their Welsh following. We called the
+      Power behind the Throne to the window in our question and she gave a glad
+      cry: &ldquo;Oh, they&rsquo;re the Neegurs! They&rsquo;re the white
+      Neegurs!&rdquo; and at sight of our compatriotic faces at the pane, these
+      beautiful giants took their stand before our house, and burst into the
+      familiar music of the log-cabin, the stern-wheel steamboat, and the
+      cornfield, as well as the ragtime melodies of later days. It was a rich
+      moment, and I know not which joyed in it more, the Welsh Power or the
+      American Sufferance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here, before I go farther afield, I must note a main difference
+      between the Welsh Power and the English slavey to whom she corresponded in
+      calling and condition. She was so far educated as to know the pseudonym of
+      the friend who came to see us, and to have read his writings in the <i>Welsh
+      Gazette</i>, treating our proposed triumph in his distinction with the
+      fine scorn she used for all our airs. If she had been an old-fashioned
+      Yankee Help she could not have been more snubbing; but when we had been
+      taught to know our place she was more tolerant, and finally took leave of
+      us without rancor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The notion of the general Welsh education which her intelligence gave us
+      was carried indefinitely farther by the grocer&rsquo;s boy to whom our
+      friend presented me one evening, after he had been struggling to make me
+      understand what an <i>englyn</i> was. I am able now to explain that it is
+      a polite stanza which the Welsh send with a present of fruit or flowers,
+      or for a greeting upon any worthy occasion. It is rhymed, sometimes at
+      both ends of the lines, and sometimes in the middle of them, and it
+      presents all the difficulties of euphony which the indomitable Welsh glory
+      in overcoming. But when my friend took me in hand, my ignorance was of so
+      dense a surface that he could make no impression on it, and he said at
+      last, &ldquo;Let us go into this grocery. There&rsquo;s a boy here who
+      will <i>show</i> you what an englyn is,&rdquo; and after I was introduced
+      the kind youth did so with pleasure, while he sold candles to one
+      customer, soap to another, cheese to another, and herring to another. He
+      first wrote the englyn in Welsh, and when I had sufficiently admired it in
+      that tongue (for which no atavistic knowledge really served me), he said
+      he would put it into English, and he did so. It was then not rhymed at
+      both ends or in the middle, but it was rhymed quite enough, and if it had
+      not the harp-like sweetness of the original, it was still such a musical
+      stanza that I shall always be sorry to have lost it. What I can never lose
+      the impression of is the wide-spread literary lore of the common Welsh
+      people which the incident suggested. I could not fancy even a Boston
+      grocer&rsquo;s boy doing the like; and perhaps this was an uncommon boy in
+      Wales itself. He told me a good deal, which I have mainly forgotten, about
+      the state of polite learning in his country and in what honor the living
+      bards were held. It seems that in that rhyming and singing little land,
+      the poets are still known as of old by their bardic names. As Jones, or
+      Evans, or Edwards they have no fame beyond other men, but up and down all
+      Wales they are celebrated as this bard or that, and are honored according
+      to their poetic worth.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      After the appearance of the White Neegurs on the Terrace, I could hardly
+      have expected any livelier appeal to my American pride, and yet it came,
+      one day, when I learned that the line of carriages which I saw passing our
+      windows were the vehicles bearing to some public function the members of
+      the British Chautauqua. How far the name and idea of Chautauqua have since
+      spread there is no saying, but it was the last of our national inventions
+      which I should have expected to find in Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture
+      was reasonably in its line, and the Eisteddfod was not out of keeping with
+      the summer conferences held beside our lovely up-State lake. The British
+      Chautauqua, as I saw it, was a group of people from all parts of the
+      United Kingdom joined in the pursuit of improvement and enjoyment, and
+      they were now here on one of their summer outings. They had been invited
+      to a gentleman&rsquo;s place not far from Aberystwyth to view as
+      indubitable a remnant of the Holy Grail as now exists, and it was my very
+      good fortune through the kind offices of that friend of ours to be invited
+      with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a blamelessly rainless afternoon, of a sort commoner on the western
+      Welsh coast than on other shores of the &ldquo;rainy isles,&rdquo; but not
+      too common even there; and we drove out of the town through the prettiest
+      country of hillside fields and valleys opening to the sea, on a road that
+      was fairly dusty in the hot sun. There were cottages, grouped and
+      detached, all the way, with gray stone walls and blue slate roofs, and in
+      places the children ran out from them with mercenary offerings of flowers
+      and song, or with frank pleas for charity direct. I yielded with
+      reluctance to the instruction of a Manchester economist in my carriage,
+      and denied them, when I would so much rather have abetted them in their
+      wicked attempts on our pockets. I remember ruefully still that they had
+      voices as sweet and eyes as dark as the children who used to chase our
+      wheels in Italy, and I have no doubt they deserved quite as well of us as
+      those did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I got back my spirits when we left our carriages, and I found myself
+      walking up a pleasant avenue of wilding trees, with a young Chautauquan
+      from Australia who looked as if he might be a young Chautauquan from
+      Alabama, tall, and lean, and brown. We fell into talk about the trees, and
+      he said how they differed in their green from the sombre gray of his
+      native forests; and then he, from that vast far continent of his, spoke of
+      the little island where we were, as Home. That has always a strange effect
+      for us self-outcasts from the great British roof, and whether it makes us
+      smile, or makes us sigh, it never fails to startle us when we hear it from
+      colonial lips. The word holds in common kindness Canada and India and
+      South Africa and Australia, and it has its pathos in the fact that the old
+      mother of these mighty children seems to leave solely to them the
+      tenderness that draws them to her in that notion of home.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There were about fifty of those British Chautauquans, and when they had
+      ranged themselves on the grass before the shrubbery of a pleasant lawn,
+      backed by a wooded slope, the dignified lady of the house came out with a
+      casket in her hand, and put it on a table, and the exercises began. Fitly,
+      if the casket really held the sacred relic, they began with prayer; then a
+      Welsh soloist followed with a hymn, but whether she sang in Welsh or
+      English, I do not remember; I am only sure she sang divinely; and then
+      came the speeches. The first of the speeches was by our friend, who was
+      the local Unitarian minister, and of a religious body not inconsiderable
+      in that Calvinistic Wales. He told us how the Holy Grail had been
+      deposited with the monks of Strata Florida, the famous old abbey near
+      Aberystwyth; but I forgot who made them this trust, unless it was King
+      Arthur&rsquo;s knights, and I am not sure whether the fact is matter of
+      legend or history. What I remember is that when the abbey was suppressed
+      by Henry VIII., certain of the escaping monks came with the relic to the
+      gentle house where we then were, and placed it in the keeping of the
+      family who have guarded it ever since.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0192}.jpg" alt="{0192}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0192}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      After our friend, the lady of this house took up the tale, and told in
+      words singularly choice and simple the story of the sacred relic as the
+      family knew it. I had only once before heard a woman speak, no less a
+      woman than our great and dear Julia Ward Howe, and it seemed to me that
+      she spoke better than any man; and I must say of the Chautauquans&rsquo;
+      hostess, that day, that if ever the Englishwomen come into their full
+      political rights, as they seem sure to do, the traditions of good sense
+      and good taste in English public speaking will not pass, but will prosper
+      on through their orators. There were touches of poetry, nationally Welsh,
+      in what she said, and touches of humor perhaps personally Welsh. It seems
+      that the cup had been famed throughout the countryside for the miraculous
+      property by which whoever drank from it was cured of his or her malady,
+      and it had been passed freely round to all sufferers ever since it came
+      into her family&rsquo;s keeping. That they might make doubly sure of the
+      miracle, it was the custom of the sick not only to empty the cup, but to
+      nibble a little bit of the wood, and swallow that, so that in whatever
+      state the monks of Strata Florida had confided it, the vessel was now in
+      the state we saw. Saying this the lady opened the casket holding it, and
+      showed us the crescent-shaped rim of a wooden bowl, about the bigness of a
+      cocoanut shell; all the rest had been consumed by the pious sufferers whom
+      it had restored to health.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am sorry, after all, to own that this cup is said by some authorities
+      not to be the Holy Grail, but a vessel like it carved out of the true
+      cross. But even so subordinate a relic is priceless, and as it is no
+      longer possible to drink from it, we may hope that the fragment will
+      remain indefinitely to after time. When they had wondered at the sight of
+      it the Chautauquans and their friend were made free of the charming
+      seventeenth-century house, which would be old for this country, but which
+      in the taste of that time was rather modern, and looked like the casino of
+      some Italian villa. It abounded, as such houses in England do, in the
+      pictured faces of the past, and in the memorials which only the centuries
+      can leave behind them, but was too graceful to seem rich. &ldquo;A home of
+      ancient peace,&rdquo; it looked, in its mild gray stone amidst its lawns
+      and shrubberies, the larger hold of the gardens and pleasaunces through
+      which the Chautauquans followed from it.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      At Aberystwyth, and elsewhere in Wales, one of the things I noticed was
+      the difference of the people from the people over the English border in
+      their attitude toward their betters. They might stand only five feet in
+      their stockings, but they stood straight, and if they were respectful,
+      they were first self-respectful. In our run from Shrewsbury, their
+      language first made itself generally heard at Newport, and it increased in
+      the unutterable names of the stations westward, the farther we passed into
+      their beautiful country, but they had always English enough to be civil,
+      though never servile. The country is beautiful in the New England measure,
+      but it is of a softer and smaller beauty; it looks more caressable; it is
+      like Vermont rather than New Hampshire, and it is more like New England
+      than Old England in the greater number of isolated farm-houses, from which
+      the girls as well as the boys come to the university colleges for learning
+      undreamt of by English farm villagers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The air was fresh and sweet, and though it seemed to shower wherever we
+      stopped to let another train go by on a siding of our single track, there
+      was a very passable sense of summer sun. The human type as we began to
+      observe it and as we saw it afterward throughout the land was not only
+      diminutive, but rather plain and mostly dark, in the men; as to the women
+      they were, as they are everywhere, charming, with now and then a face of
+      extraordinary loveliness, and nearly always the exquisite West of England
+      complexion. In their manners the people could not be more amiable than the
+      English, who are as amiable as possible, but they seemed brighter and
+      gayer. This remained their effect to the last in Aberystwyth, and when one
+      left the Terrace where the English visitors superabounded, the Welsh had
+      the whole place to themselves. I would not push my conjecture, but it
+      seemed to me that there was an absence of the cloying loyalty which makes
+      sojourn in England afflictive to the republican spirit; I remember but one
+      shop dedicated to the King&rsquo;s Majesty, with the royal arms over the
+      door, though there may have been many others; I am always warning the
+      reader not to take me too literally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though I was about the streets by day and by dark, I saw no disorderly
+      behavior of any kind in the town away from the beach; I do not mean there
+      was any by the sea, unless some athletic courtship among the young people
+      of the watering-place element was to be accounted so. There was not much
+      fashion there, except in a few pretty women who recalled the church parade
+      of Hyde Park in their flowery and feathery costumes. Back in the town
+      there was no fashion at all, but a general decency and comfort of dress.
+      The Welsh costume survives almost solely in the picture-postal cards,
+      though perhaps in the hilly fastnesses the women still wear the
+      steeple-crowned hats which we associate with the notion of witches; when
+      they come to market in Aberystwyth they wear hard, shiny black straw hats
+      like the men&rsquo;s. Amongst the throng of Saturday-night shoppers I saw
+      none of the drunkenness that one sees so often in Scottish streets, and in
+      English cities, and, I grieve to say, even in some New England towns. In
+      the Welsh quarter Sunday was much more the Sabbath than it was on the
+      Terrace, where indeed it seemed a day of pleasure rather than praise.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      All the week I had the best intention of hearing the singing in some of
+      the Welsh churches, but my goodwill could not carry the day against the
+      fear of a sermon which I should not understand. A chance sermon would
+      probably have touched upon the education act which was then stirring all
+      Dissenting England and Wales to passive resistance, and from Lincolnshire
+      to Carnarvonshire was causing the distraint of tables and chairs, tools,
+      hams, clocks, clothing, poultry, and crops for the payment of such part of
+      the Dissenters&rsquo; taxes as would go to the support of the Church
+      schools. Possibly it might also have referred to the Walk Out of the Welsh
+      Members of Parliament; this was an incident which I heard mentioned as of
+      imperial importance, though what caused it or came of it I do not know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead of going to church, I strolled up and down the Terrace and
+      observed the watering-place life. The town was evidently full, or at least
+      all the lodging-houses were, and as it is with the English everywhere in
+      their summer resorts, there were men enough to go round, so that no poor
+      dear need pine for a mate on that pleasant beach. Aberystwyth is therefore
+      to be commended to our overflow of girls, though whether there are many
+      eligible noblemen among those youth I have not the statistics for saying.
+      All the visitors may have been people of rank; I only know that I was told
+      they were mostly from the midland cities, and they seemed to be having the
+      good time which people of brief outings alone have. The bathing began, as
+      I have noted, very early in the day with the men in the briefest possible
+      tights; the women, for compensation, wore long trousers with their
+      bathing-skirts, and they enhanced the modesty of their effect by the
+      universal use of bathing-machines, pushed well away from the curious
+      shore. There was not much variety in the visiting English type, but there
+      was here and there a sharp imperial accent, as in the two pale little,
+      spindle-legged Anglo-Indian boys, with their Hindu ayah, very dark, with
+      sleek dark hair, and gleaming eyes in a head not much bigger than a black
+      walnut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crescent of the beach was a serried series of hotels and
+      lodging-houses, from tip to tip, but back of these were streets of
+      homelike, smallish dwellings, that broke rank farther away, and scattered
+      about in suburban villas, with trees and flowers and grass around them.
+      Beyond stretched, as well as it could stretch among its hills, the
+      charming country of fields, and woods, and orchards.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I suppose I did not quite do my duty by the ruins of the Norman castle,
+      and I feel that it is now too late to repair my neglect. The stronghold
+      was more than once attempted by the Welsh in those wars which make their
+      history a catalogue of battles, but it held out Norman till the Normans
+      turned English. Owen Glendover took it in 1402, when it was three hundred
+      years old, though not yet feeble with age, and in due time one of Cromwell&rsquo;s
+      lieutenants destroyed it. Some very picturesque fragments remain to attest
+      the grace and strength of the ancient hold. It is near the University
+      College and the Amusement Pier, so that the mere sight-seers can do all
+      the ordinary objects of interest at Aberystwyth in half a day or half an
+      hour. But we were none of these. We had fallen in love with the place, and
+      we would fain have stayed on after the week was up for which we had taken
+      our lodging. It appeared from a house-to-house canvass, that there was no
+      other lodging to be had in all that long crescent of the Terrace; or, if
+      this is incredible, there was none we would have. Our successors were
+      impending; and though I think our English landlady might have invented
+      something for us at the last moment, the Welsh Power was inexorable. Her
+      ideal was lodgers who would go out and buy their own provisions, and we
+      had set our faces against that. Some one must yield, and the Welsh Power
+      could not; it was not in her nature. We were therefore in a manner
+      expelled from Aberystwyth, but our banishment was not from all Wales, and
+      this was how we went next to Llandudno.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Froissart&rsquo;s saying, if it was Froissart&rsquo;s, that the English
+      amuse themselves sadly antedates that notion of Merry England which is now
+      generally rejected by serious observers. I should myself prefer the
+      agnostic position, and say that I did not know whether the English were
+      glad or not when they looked gay. What I seem to be certain of, but I do
+      not say that I am certain, is that they look gayer in their places of
+      amusement than we do. I do not mean theatres, or parliaments, or
+      music-halls, or lecture-rooms, by places of amusement, but what we call
+      summer resorts a little more largely than those resorts which the English
+      call watering-places. Of these I should like to take as a type the
+      charming summer resort on the coast of North Wales which is called
+      Llandudno in print, and in speech several different ways.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The English simply and frankly, after their blunt nature, call the place
+      Landudno, but the Welsh call it, according to one superstition of their
+      double <i>l</i> and their French <i>u</i>, Thlandidno. According to
+      another, we cannot spell it in English at all; but it does not much
+      matter, for the last superstition is the ever-delightful but ever-doubtful
+      George Borrow&rsquo;s, who says that the Welsh <i>ll</i> is the same as
+      the Spanish <i>ll</i>, but who is probably mistaken, most other
+      authorities agreeing that if you pronounce it <i>lhl</i> you will come as
+      near it as any Saeseneg need. It is a constantly besetting question in
+      Wales, where the prefix <i>Llan</i> speckles the map all over, owing to
+      that multitude of Saints who peopled the country in the times when a Saint&rsquo;s
+      sons were every one saints, and none was of particularly holy, or even
+      good life, because he was known for a saint. Like a continental noble, he
+      inherited his title equally with all his brothers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But through whatever orthoepic mazes you search it, Llandudno has every
+      claim on your regard and admiration. Like Aberystwyth, its sea front is a
+      shallow crescent, but vaster, with a larger town expanding back of it, and
+      with loftier and sublimer headlands, at either end, closing it in a more
+      symmetrical frame. But I should say that its sea was not so blue, or its
+      sky either, and its air was not so soft or dry. Morally it is more
+      constantly lively, with a greater and more insistent variety of
+      entertainments. For the American its appeal might well have begun with the
+      sight of his country&rsquo;s flag floating over a tennis-ground at the
+      neighboring watering-place and purer Welsh town of Rhyl. The approach to
+      his affections was confirmed by another American flag displayed before one
+      of the chief hotels in Llandudno itself. I learned afterward of the
+      landlord that this was because there were several Chicago families in his
+      house, and fifteen Americans in all; but why the tennis-ground of Rhyl
+      flew our national banner, I do not know to this day. It was indeed that
+      gentle moment when our innocent people believed themselves peculiarly dear
+      to the English, and might naturally suppose, if from Chicago, or Boston,
+      or Denver, that the English would wish to see as often as possible the
+      symbol of our successful revolt from the princes and principles to which
+      they have religiously adhered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0204}.jpg" alt="{0204}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0204}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      Both that home of the patriotic Chicago families, and the other best hotel
+      were too full for us, and after a round of the second-best we decided for
+      lodgings, hoping as usual that they would bring us nearer the native life.
+      The best we could get, facing the sea midway of the crescent, were not
+      exactly Welsh in their keeping. The landladies were, in fact, two elderly
+      Church-of-England sisters from Dublin, who had named their house out of a
+      novel they had read. They said they believed the name was Italian, and the
+      reader shall judge if it were so from its analogue of Osier Wood. The
+      maids in the house, however, were very truly and very wickedly Welsh: two
+      tough little ponies of girls, who tied their hair up with shoe-strings,
+      and were forbidden, when about their work, to talk Welsh together, lest
+      they should speak lezing of those Irish ladies. The rogues were half
+      English, but the gentle creature who served our table was wholly Welsh;
+      small, sweet-voiced, dark-eyed, intelligent, who suffered from the
+      universal rheumatism of the British Isles, but kept steadily to her duty,
+      and accepted her fate with patience and even cheerfulness. She waited on
+      several other tables, for the house was full of lodgers, all rather less
+      permanent than ourselves, who were there for a fortnight; we found our
+      landladies hoping, when we said we were going, to have had us with them
+      through the winter.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Our fellow-lodgers were quiet people of divers degrees, except perhaps the
+      highest, unless the nobility bring boiled hams with them when they visit
+      the seaside. The boiled ham of the drawing-room floor was frankly set out
+      on the hall table, where it seemed to last a week, or at least till the
+      lodgers went away. There was much coming and going, for it was the height
+      of the season, with the prices at flood tide. We paid six guineas a week
+      for three bedrooms and a sitting-room; but our landladies owned it was
+      dear. An infirm and superannuated sideboard served for a dressing-table in
+      one room; in others the heavier pieces of furniture stood sometimes on
+      four legs, sometimes on three. We had the advantage of two cats on the
+      back fence, and a dog in the back yard; but if the controversy between
+      them was carried on in Welsh, it is no wonder we never knew what it was
+      about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our hostesses said the Welsh were dirty housekeepers: &ldquo;At least <i>we</i>
+      think so,&rdquo; but I am bound to say their own cooking was very good;
+      and not being Welsh our hostesses consented to market for us, except in
+      the article of Spanish melons: these I bought myself of increasing cost
+      and size. When I alleged, the second morning, that the melon then sold me
+      for sixpence had been sold me by another boy for fourpence the day before,
+      my actual Cymric youth said, &ldquo;Then he asked you too little,&rdquo;
+      which seemed a <i>non sequitur</i> but was really an unexpected stroke of
+      logic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the utmost severity used with me by my co-racials in Llandudno.
+      They were in the great majority of the permanent inhabitants, but they
+      were easily outnumbered among the pleasurers by the Saeseneg, whose
+      language prevailed, so that a chance word of Welsh now and then was all
+      that I heard in the streets. Some faint stirrings of ambition to follow
+      the language as far as a phrase-book would lead were not encouraged by the
+      kindly bookseller who took my money for it; and I did not go on. It is a
+      loss for me in literature which translation cannot supply, for the English
+      lovers of Welsh poetry, after praising it to the skies, are never able to
+      produce anything which is not direly mechanical and vacuous. The native
+      charm somehow escapes them; the grace beyond the reach of art remains with
+      the Cymric poets who have resources for its capture unknown to their
+      English admirers. George Borrow seems the worst failure in this sort, and
+      the worst offender in giving his reader the hopes he never fulfils, so
+      that his <i>Wild Wales</i> is a desert of blighted literary promises. I
+      believe that the merit of Welsh poetry dwells largely, perhaps
+      overlargely, in its intricate technique, and in the euphonic changes which
+      leave the spoken word ready for singing almost without the offices of the
+      composer.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      One of the great musical contests, the yearly national Eisteddfod, was
+      taking place that year at the neighboring town of Rhyl, but I did not go
+      to hear it, not being good for a week&rsquo;s music without intermission.
+      At Llandudno there was only the music of the Pierrots and the Niggers,
+      which those simple-hearted English have borrowed, the one from France and
+      the other from these States. Their passion for our colored minstrelsy is,
+      in fact, something pathetic. They like Pierrots well enough, and Pierrots
+      <i>are</i> amusing, there is no doubt of it; but they dote upon Niggers,
+      as they call them with a brutality unknown among us except to the
+      vulgarest white men and boys, and the negroes themselves in moments of
+      exasperation. Negro minstrelsy is almost extinct in the land of its birth,
+      but in the land of its adoption it flourishes in the vigor of undying
+      youth: no watering-place is genuine without it. Bands of Niggers haunt the
+      streets and suburbs of London, and apparently every high day or holiday
+      throughout the British Islands requires the stamp of their presence as a
+      nostrum requires the name of the patentee blown in the bottle. The decay
+      of their gay science began among us with the fall of slavery, and the
+      passing of the old plantation life; but as these never existed in Great
+      Britain the English version of negro minstrelsy is not affected by their
+      disappearance. It is like the English tradition of the Red Skins, which
+      has all but vanished from our superstition, but remains as powerful as
+      ever in the constant fancy of those islanders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The English like their Niggers very, very black, and as their Niggers are
+      English they know how to gratify the national preference: such a spread of
+      scarlet lips over half the shining sable face is known nowhere else in
+      nature or art; and it must have been in despair of rivalling their
+      fellow-minstrels that the small American troupe we saw at Aberystwyth went
+      to the opposite extreme and frankly appeared as the White Neegurs. At
+      Llandudno the blackness of the Niggers was absolute, so that it almost
+      darkened the day as they passed our lodging, along the crescent of the
+      beach on their way to their open-air theatre beyond it. They were followed
+      by a joyous retinue of boys and girls, tradesmen&rsquo;s apprentices,
+      donkeys, bath-chairs, and all the movable gladness of the watering-place,
+      to the music of their banjos and the sound of their singing. They were
+      going to a fold of the foot-hills called the Happy Valley, bestowed on the
+      public for such pleasures by the local nobleman whose title is given to a
+      principal street, and to other points and places, I suppose out of the
+      public pride and gratitude. It is a charming amphitheatre overlooked by
+      the lofty tops around, and there on the green slope the Niggers had set up
+      their stage, and ranged the spectators&rsquo; chairs in the classification
+      of first, second, and third so dear to the British soul. There they
+      cracked their jokes, and there they sang their songs; the songs were newer
+      than the jokes, but they were both kinds delivered with a strong Cockney
+      accent, and without an aspirate in its place. But it was all richly
+      acceptable to the audience, who laughed and cheered and joined in the
+      chorus when asked. Here, as everywhere, the crowd delighted equally in
+      songs of the sloppiest sentimentality and of humor nighest indecency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0210}.jpg" alt="{0210}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0210}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      On the afternoon of our visit the good lady next me could not contain her
+      peculiar pride in the entertainment, and confided that she knew the leader
+      of the troupe, who was an old friend of her husband&rsquo;s. It was indeed
+      a time and place that invited to expansion. Nothing could have been
+      friendlier and livelier than the spectacle of the spectators spread over
+      the grassy slope, or sublimer than the rise of the hills around, or more
+      enchanting than the summer sea, with the large and little shipping on it,
+      and the passenger-steamers going and coming from Liverpool and all the
+      points in the region round. The two headlands which mark the limits of the
+      beautiful beach, Great Orme&rsquo;s Head, and Little Orme&rsquo;s Head,
+      are both of a nobleness tempered to kindliness by the soft and manageable
+      beauty of their forms. I never got quite so far as Little Orme&rsquo;s
+      Head, for it was full two miles from our lodging, and a fortnight was not
+      long enough for the journey, but with Great Orme&rsquo;s Head I was on
+      terms of very tolerable intimacy. A road of the excellence peculiar to
+      England passes round on the chin, so to speak, and though I never went the
+      length of it, I went far enough to know the majesty of the seaward
+      prospect. From the crown of the Head there is a view of perhaps all the
+      mountains in Wales, which from this point appears entirely composed of
+      mountains, blue, blue and enchantingly fair. On the townward side you may
+      descend into the Happy Valley, as we did, and find always a joyous crowd
+      listening to the Niggers. If, after some doubt of your way, you have the
+      favor of a nice boy and an intelligent collie dog, whom the boy is helping
+      herd home the evening cows of a pleasant farm, you will have a charming
+      glimpse of the local civilization; and perhaps you will notice that the
+      cows do not pay much attention to the boy, but obey the dog implicitly; it
+      is their Old World convention.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      From another side we had ascended the mountain by the tram line which
+      climbs it to the top, and at every twist and turn lavishes some fresh
+      loveliness of landscape upon your vision. Near by, we noticed many
+      depressions and sinkages in the ground, and a conversable man in
+      well-oiled overalls who joined us at a power-house, said it was from the
+      giving way of the timbers in the disused copper-mines. Were they very old,
+      we asked, and he said they had not been worked for forty years; but this,
+      when you come to think of the abandoned Roman mines yet deeper in the
+      hill, was a thing of yesterday. The man in the oily overalls had evidently
+      not come to think of it, but he was otherwise a very intelligent mechanic,
+      and of a hospitable mind, like all the rest of our chance acquaintance in
+      Great Britain. I do not know that I like to think of those Roman mines
+      myself, where it is said the sea now surges back and forth: they must have
+      been worked by British slaves, who may be fancied climbing purblindly out
+      when the legions left Britain, and not joining very loudly in the general
+      lamentation at their withdrawal, but probably tempering the popular grief
+      with the reflection that the heathen Saxons could not be much worse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hill-top was covered with the trippers who seem perpetually holidaying
+      on their island, and who were always kind to their children when they had
+      them, and to each other when they had not. They were commonly in couples,
+      very affectionate and inoffensively young. They wandered about, and from
+      time to time went and had tea at one of the tea-houses which are always at
+      hand over there. Except the view there was not much to see; the ways were
+      rough; now and then you came to a pink cottage or a white one where the
+      peasantry, again, sold tea. At one place in our walk over the occiput of
+      Great Orme&rsquo;s Head into the Happy Valley in its bosom, we fell a prey
+      to a conspiracy of boys selling mignonette: it appeared to be a mignonette
+      trust, or syndicate, confining its commerce to that flower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have no other statistics to offer concerning business on Great Orme&rsquo;s
+      Head, or indeed in all Llandudno. One of the chief industries seemed to be
+      coaching, for a score of delightful places are to be easily reached by the
+      stages always departing from the hotels on the Parade. There was no
+      particularly noticeable traffic in leek, though I suppose that as I did
+      not see the national emblem in any Welshman&rsquo;s hat&mdash;to be sure,
+      it was not St. David&rsquo;s Day&mdash;it must have been boiling in every
+      Welshman&rsquo;s pot. I am rather ashamed to be joining, even at this
+      remove, in the poor English joking which goes on about the Welsh, quite as
+      much as about the Scotch, the Irish having become too grave a matter for
+      joking. There are little burlesque manuals making merry with the language
+      and its agglutinative prolixity, which I shall certainly not quote; and
+      there are postal-cards representing Welsh dames drinking tea in tall
+      witch-hats, with one of them saying: &ldquo;I wass enjoying myself
+      shocking, look you.&rdquo; There was, of course, nothing serious in this
+      joking; the Welsh, who have all the small commerce in their hands, gladly
+      sold the manuals and postals, and I did not see one Englishman laughing
+      over them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Saeseneg visitors rather amused themselves with the sea and the
+      resources of the beach and the bathing. As contrasted with the visitors at
+      Aberystwyth, so distinctly in the earlier and later stages of love-making,
+      I should say those at Llandudno were domestic: fathers and mothers who
+      used the long phalanx of bathing-machines appointed to their different
+      sexes, and their children who played in the sand. I thought the children
+      charming, and I contributed tuppence to aid in the repair of the sand
+      castle of two nice little boys which had fallen down; it now seems strange
+      that I should have been asked for a subscription, but in England
+      subscriptions spare nobody; though I wonder if two such nice little boys
+      would have come to me for money in America. Besides the entertainment of
+      lying all afternoon on the beach, or sitting beside it in canopied penny
+      chairs, there was more active diversion for all ages and sexes in the
+      circus prevailing somewhere in the background, and advertising itself
+      every afternoon by a procession of six young elephants neatly carrying
+      each in his trunk the tail of the elephant before him. There were also the
+      delightful shows of the amusement pier where one could go and see Pierrots
+      to one&rsquo;s heart&rsquo;s content, if one can ever get enough of
+      Pierrots; I never can.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0216}.jpg" alt="{0216}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0216}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      Besides all these daytime things there were two very good theatres, at one
+      of which I saw Mr. Barrie&rsquo;s <i>Little Mary</i> given better than in
+      New York (that was easy), and at the other a comic opera, with a bit of
+      comedy or tragedy in a stage-box, not announced in the bills. The audience
+      was otherwise decorous enough to be composed of Welsh Baptist elders and
+      their visiting friends, but in this box there were two young men in
+      evening dress, scuffling with a young woman in dinner décolletée, and what
+      appeared to be diamonds in her ears. They were trying, after what seems
+      the convention of English seaside flirtation, to get something out of her
+      hand, and allowing her successfully to resist them; and their playful
+      contest went on through a whole act to the distraction of the spectators,
+      who did not seem greatly scandalized. It suggested the misgiving that
+      perhaps bad people came to Llandudno for their summer outing as well as
+      good; but there was no interference by the police or the management with
+      this robust side-show. Were the actors in the scene, all or any of them,
+      too high in rank to be lightly molested in their lively event; or were
+      they too low? Perhaps they were merely tipsy, but all the same their
+      interlude was a contribution to the evening&rsquo;s entertainment which
+      would not have been so placidly accepted in, say, Atlantic City, or Coney
+      Island, or even Newport, where people are said to be more accustomed to
+      the caprices of society persons, and more indulgent of their whims.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      A more improving, and on the whole more pleasing, phase of the indigenous
+      life, and also more like a phase of our own, showed itself the day of our
+      visit to Conway, a little way from Llandudno. There, on our offering to
+      see the ruins of the wonderful and beautiful old castle, we were met at
+      the entrance with a demand for an exceptional shilling gate money, because
+      of the fair for the local Wesleyan Chapel which was holding in the
+      interior. What seemed at first a hardship turned out a chance which we
+      would not have missed on any account. There was a large tent set up in the
+      old castle court, and a table spread with home-made dainties of many
+      sorts, and waited upon by gentle maids and matrons who served one with tea
+      or whatever else one liked, all for that generously inclusive shilling.
+      They were Welsh, they told us, and they were speaking their language to
+      right and left of us, while they were so courteous to us in English. It
+      was quite like a church fair in some American village, where, however, it
+      could not have had the advantage of a ruined Norman castle for its scene,
+      and where it would not have provided a range for target practice with
+      air-guns, or grounds for running and jumping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The place was filled with people young and old who were quietly amusing
+      themselves and were more taken up with the fair than with the castle. I
+      must myself comparatively slight the castle in the present study of people
+      rather than places, though I may note that if there is any more
+      interesting ruin in the world, I am satisfied with this which it
+      surpasses. Besides its beauty, what strikes one most is its perfect
+      adaptation to the original purpose of palace and fortress for which the
+      Normans planned their strongholds in Wales. The architect built not only
+      with a constant instinct of beauty, but with unsurpassable science and
+      skill. The skill and the science have gone the way of the need of them,
+      but the beauty remains indelible and as eternal as the hunger for it in
+      the human soul. Conway castle is not all a ruin, even as a fortress,
+      however. Great part of it still challenges decay, and is so entire in its
+      outward shape that it has inspired the railway running under its shoulder
+      to attempt a conformity of style in the bridge approaching it, but without
+      enabling it to an equal effect of grandeur. One would as soon the bridge
+      had not tried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All Conway is worthy, within its ancient walls, of as much devotion as one
+      can render it in the rain, which begins as soon as you leave the castle.
+      The walls climb from the waters to the hills, and the streets wander up
+      and down and seem to the stranger mainly to seek that beautiful old Tudor
+      house, Plas Mawr, which like the castle is without rival in its kind. It
+      was full of reeking and streaming sight-seers, among whom one could easily
+      find one&rsquo;s self incommoded without feeling one&rsquo;s self a part
+      of the incommodation, but in spite of them there was the assurance of
+      comfort as well as splendor in the noble old mansion, such as the
+      Elizabethan houses so successfully studied. In the dining-room a corner of
+      the mantel has its sandstone deeply worn away, and a much-elbowed
+      architect, who was taking measurements of the chimney, agreed that this
+      carf was the effect of the host or the butler flying to the place and
+      sharpening his knife for whatever haunch of venison or round of beef was
+      toward. It was a fine memento of the domestic past, and there was a secret
+      chamber where the refugees of this cause or that in other times were
+      lodged in great discomfort. Besides, there was a ghost which was fairly
+      crowded out of its accustomed quarters, where so far from being able to
+      walk, it would have had much ado to stand upright by flattening itself
+      against the wall.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In fact, there was not much more room that day in the Plas Mawr, than in
+      the Smallest House in the World, which is the next chiefest attraction of
+      Conway. This, too, was crammed with damp enthusiasts, passionately eager
+      to sign their names in the guest-book. They scarcely left space in the
+      sitting-room of ten by twelve feet for the merry old hostess selling
+      photographs and ironically inviting her visitors&rsquo; guests to a
+      glimpse of the chamber overhead, or so much of it as the bed allowed to be
+      seen. She seemed not to believe in her abode as a practicable tenement,
+      and could not be got to say that she actually lived in it; as to why it
+      was built so small she was equally vague. But there it was, to like or to
+      leave, and there, not far off, was the &ldquo;briny beach&rdquo; where the
+      Walrus and the Carpenter walked together,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;And wept like anything to see
+      Such quantities of sand.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      For it was in Conway, as history or tradition is, that <i>Through the
+      Looking-Glass</i> was written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are very few places in those storied British Isles which are not
+      hallowed by some association with literature; but I suppose that Llandudno
+      is as exempt as any can be, and I will not try to invoke any dear and
+      honored shade from its doubtful obscurity. We once varied the even tenor
+      of our days there by driving to Penmaenmawr, and wreaking our love of
+      literary associations so far as we might by connecting the place with the
+      memory of Gladstone, who was literary as well as political. We thought
+      with him that Penmaenmawr was &ldquo;the most charming watering-place in
+      Wales,&rdquo; and as you drive into the place, the eye of faith will
+      detect the house, on the right, in which he spent many happy summers. We
+      contented ourselves with driving direct to the principal hotel, where I
+      know not what kept us from placing ourselves for life. We had tea and jam
+      en the pretty lawn, and the society of a large company of wasps of the
+      yellow-jacket variety, which must have been true Welsh wasps, as peaceful
+      as they were musical, and no interloping Scotch or Irish, for they did not
+      offer to attack us, but confined themselves altogether to our jam: to be
+      sure, we thought best to leave it to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0222}.jpg" alt="{0222}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0222}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      It is said that the purple year is not purpler at any point on the
+      southernmost shores of England than it is at Llandudno. In proof of the
+      mildness of its winter climate, the presence of many sorts of tender
+      evergreens is alleged, and the persistence of flowers in blooming from
+      Christmas to Easter. But those who have known the deceitful habits of
+      flowers on the Riviera, where they bloom in any but an arctic degree of
+      cold, will not perhaps hurry to Llandudno much later than November. All
+      the way to Penmaenmawr the flowers showed us what they could do in summer,
+      whether in field or garden, and there was one beautiful hill on which
+      immense sweeps and slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather boldly
+      stretched separately, or mingled their dyes in the fearlessness of nature
+      when she spurns the canons of art. I suppose there is no upholsterer or
+      paperhanger who would advise mixing or matching yellow and purple in the
+      decoration of a room, but here the outdoor effect rapt the eye in a
+      transport of delight. It was indeed a day when almost any arrangement of
+      colors would have pleased.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It is not easy in that much summer-resorted region to get at the country
+      in other than its wilder moods; it is either town or mountain; but now and
+      then one found one&rsquo;s self among harvest-fields, where the yield of
+      wheat and oats was far heavier than with us, either because the soil was
+      richer or the tilth thorougher. The farms indeed looked very fertile, and
+      the farmhouses very alluringly clean and neat, at least on the outside.
+      They were not gray, as in the West of England, or brick as in the
+      Southeast, but were of stone whitewashed, and the roofs were of slate, and
+      not thatch or tile. As I have noted, they were not so much gathered into
+      villages as in England, and again, as I have noted, it is out of such
+      houses that the farmers&rsquo; boys and girls go to the co-educational
+      colleges of the Welsh University. It is still the preference of the
+      farmers that their sons should be educated for the ministry, which in that
+      country of multiplied dissents has pulpits for every color of
+      contrary-mindedness, as well as livings of the not yet disestablished
+      English Church. It is not indeed the English Church in speech. The Welsh
+      will have their service and their sermon in their own tongue, and when an
+      Oxford or Cambridge man is given a Welsh living, he must do what he can to
+      conform to the popular demand. It is said that in one case, where the
+      incumbent long held out against the parish, he compromised by reading the
+      service in Welsh with the English pronunciation. But the Welsh churches
+      are now supplied with Welsh-speaking clergy, though whether it is well for
+      the Welsh to cling so strongly to their ancient speech is doubted by many
+      Welshmen. These hold that it cramps and dwarfs the national genius; but in
+      the mean time in Ireland the national genius, long enlarged to our
+      universal English, offers the strange spectacle of an endeavor to climb
+      back into its Gaelic shell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0226}.jpg" alt="{0226}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0226}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      I do not know whether an incident of my experience in coming from Chester
+      to Llandudno is to be offered as an illustration of Welsh manners or of
+      English manners. A woman of the middle rank, certainly below gentlewoman,
+      but very personable and well dressed, got into our carriage where there
+      was no seat for her. She was no longer young, but she was not so old as
+      the American who offered her his seat. She refused it, but consented to
+      sit on the hand-bag and rug which he arranged for her, and so remained
+      till she left the train, while a half-grown boy and several young men kept
+      their countenances and their places, not apparently dreaming of offering
+      her a seat, or if they thought of her at all, thought she was well
+      punished for letting the guard crowd her in upon us. By her stature and
+      complexion she was undoubtedly Welsh, and these youth from theirs were as
+      undoubtedly English. Perhaps, then, the incident had better be offered as
+      an illustration of Welsh and English manners combined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Nothing is so individual in any man as the peculiar blend of
+      characteristics which he has inherited from his racial ancestries. The
+      Englishman, who leaves the stamp of the most distinct personality upon
+      others, is the most mixed, the most various, the most relative of all men.
+      He is not English except as he is Welsh, Dutch, and Norman, with &ldquo;a
+      little Latin and less Greek&rdquo; from his earliest visitors and
+      invaders. This conception of him will indefinitely simplify the study of
+      his nature if it is made in the spirit of the frank superficiality which I
+      propose to myself. After the most careful scrutiny which I shall be able
+      to give him, he will remain, for every future American, the contradiction,
+      the anomaly, the mystery which I expect to leave him.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      No error of the Englishman&rsquo;s latest invader is commoner than the
+      notion, which perhaps soonest suggests itself, that he is a sort of
+      American, tardily arriving at our kind of consciousness, with the
+      disadvantages of an alien environment, after apparently hopeless arrest in
+      unfriendly conditions. The reverse may much more easily be true; we may be
+      a sort of Englishmen, and the Englishman, if he comes to us and abides
+      with us, may become a sort of American. But that is the affair of a
+      possible future, and the actual Englishman is certainly not yet any sort
+      of American, unless, indeed, for good and for bad, he is a better sort of
+      Bostonian. He does not even speak the American language, whatever
+      outlandish accent he uses in speaking his own. It may be said, rather too
+      largely, too loosely, that the more cultivated he is, the more he will
+      speak like a cultivated American, until you come to the King, or the Royal
+      Family, with whom a strong German accent is reported to prevail. The
+      Englishman may write American, if he is a very good writer, but in no case
+      does he spell American. He prefers, as far as he remembers it, the Norman
+      spelling, and, the Conqueror having said &ldquo;<i>geôle</i>,&rdquo; the
+      Conquered print &ldquo;gaol,&rdquo; which the American invader must
+      pronounce &ldquo;jail,&rdquo; not &ldquo;gayol.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mere mention of the Royal Family advances us to the most marked of all
+      the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is not
+      superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned
+      principle, but a passion induced by the general volition. Whatever it is,
+      it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly pervasive of
+      the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago&mdash;say, fifteen or twenty&mdash;it
+      was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known at all with many
+      in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges, or the time of the
+      happy-go-lucky sailor William; in the earlier time of Victoria, it was a
+      chivalrous devotion among the classes, and with the masses an affection
+      which almost no other sovereign has inspired. I should not be going
+      farther than some Englishmen if I said that her personal character saved
+      the monarchy; when she died there was not a vestige of the republican
+      dream which had remained from a sentiment for &ldquo;the free peoples of
+      antiquity&rdquo; rather than from the Commonwealth. Democracy had indeed
+      effected itself in a wide-spread socialism, but the kingship was safe in
+      the hearts of the Queen&rsquo;s subjects when the Prince of Wales, who was
+      the first of them, went about praising loyalty as prime among the civic
+      virtues and duties. The notion took the general fancy, and met with an
+      acceptance in which the old superstition of kings by divine right was
+      resuscitated with the vulgar. One of the vulgar lately said to an American
+      woman who owned that we did not yield an equal personal fealty to all our
+      Presidents, &ldquo;Oh yes, but you know that it is only your <i>people</i>
+      that choose the President, but <i>God</i> gave us the King.&rdquo; Nothing
+      could be opposed to a belief so simple, as in the churches of the eldest
+      faith the humble worshipper could not well be told that the picture or the
+      statue of his adoration was not itself sacred. In fact, it is not going
+      too far, at least for a very adventurous spirit, to say that loyalty with
+      the English is a sort of religious principle. What is with us more or less
+      a joke, sometimes bad, sometimes good, namely, our allegiance to the
+      powers that be in the person of the Chief Magistrate, is with them a most
+      serious thing, at which no man may smile without loss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was so far from wishing myself to smile at it, that I darkled most
+      respectfully about it, without the courage to inquire directly into the
+      mystery. If it was often on my tongue to ask, &ldquo;What is loyalty? How
+      did you come by it? Why are you loyal?&rdquo;&mdash;I felt that it would
+      be embarrassing when it would not be offensive, and I should vainly plead
+      in excuse that this property of theirs mystified me the more because it
+      seemed absolutely left out of the American nature. I perceived that in the
+      English it was not less really present because it was mixed, or used to be
+      mixed, with scandal that the alien can do no more than hint at. That sort
+      of abuse has long ceased, and if one were now to censure the King, or any
+      of the Royal Family, it would be felt to be rather ill bred, and quite
+      unfair, since royalty is in no position to reply to criticism. Even the
+      Socialists would think it ill-mannered, though in their hearts, if not in
+      their sleeves, they must all the while be smiling at the notion of
+      anything sacred in the Sovereign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0236}.jpg" alt="{0236}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0236}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Loyalty, like so many other things in England, is a convention to which
+      the alien will tacitly conform in the measure of his good taste or his
+      good sense. It is not his affair, and in the mean time it is a most
+      curious and interesting spectacle; but it is not more remarkable, perhaps,
+      than the perfect acquiescence in the aristocratic forms of society which
+      hedge the King with their divinity. We think that family counts for much
+      with ourselves, in New England or in Virginia; but it counts for nothing
+      at all in comparison with the face value at which it is current in
+      England. We think we are subject to our plutocracy, when we are very much
+      out of humor or out of heart, in some such measure as the commoners of
+      England are subject to the aristocracy; but that is nonsense. A very rich
+      man with us is all the more ridiculous for his more millions; he becomes a
+      byword if not a hissing; he is the meat of the paragrapher, the awful
+      example of the preacher; his money is found to smell of his methods. But
+      in England, the greater a nobleman is, the greater his honor. The American
+      mother who imagines marrying her daughter to an English duke, cannot even
+      imagine an English duke&mdash;say, like him of Devonshire, or him of
+      Northumberland, or him of Norfolk&mdash;with the social power and state
+      which wait upon him in his duchy and in the whole realm; and so is it in
+      degree down to the latest and lowest of the baronets, and of those yet
+      humbler men who have been knighted for their merits and services in
+      medicine, in literature, in art. The greater and greatest nobles are
+      established in a fear which is very like what the fear of God used to be
+      when the common people feared Him; and, though they are potent political
+      magnates, they mainly rule as the King himself does, through the secular
+      reverence of those beneath them for their titles and the visible images of
+      their state. They are wealthy men, of course, with so much substance that,
+      when one now and then attempts to waste it, he can hardly do so; but their
+      wealth alone would not establish them in the popular regard. His wealth
+      does no such effect for Mr. Astor in England; and mere money, though it is
+      much desired by all, is no more venerated in the person of its possessor
+      than it is with us. It is ancestry, it is the uncontested primacy of
+      families first in their place, time out of mind, that lays its resistless
+      hold upon the fancy and bows the spirit before it. By means of this comes
+      the sovereign effect in the political as well as the social state; for,
+      though the people vote into or out of power those who vote other people
+      into or out of the administration, it is always&mdash;or so nearly always
+      that the exception proves the rule&mdash;family that rules, from the King
+      down to the least attaché of the most unimportant embassy. No doubt many
+      of the English are restive under the fact; and, if one had asked their
+      mind about it, one might have found them frank enough; but, never asking
+      it, it was with amusement that I heard said once, as if such a thing had
+      never occurred to anybody before, &ldquo;Yes, isn&rsquo;t it strange that
+      those few families should keep it all among themselves!&rdquo; It was a
+      slender female voice, lifted by a young girl with an air of pensive
+      surprise, as at a curious usage of some realm of faery.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      England is in fact, to the American, always a realm of faery, in its
+      political and social constitution. It must be owned, concerning the
+      government by family, that it certainly seems to work well. That justifies
+      it, so far as the exclusion of the immense majority from the
+      administration of their own affairs can be justified by anything; though I
+      hold that the worst form of graft in office is hardly less justifiable:
+      that is, at least, one of the people picking their pockets. But it is the
+      universal make-believe behind all the practical virtue of the state that
+      constitutes the English monarchy a realm of faery. The whole population,
+      both the great and the small, by a common effort of the will, agree that
+      there is a man or a woman of a certain line who can rightfully inherit the
+      primacy amongst them, and can be dedicated through this right to live the
+      life of a god, to be so worshipped and flattered, so cockered about with
+      every form of moral and material flummery, that he or she may well be more
+      than human not to be made a fool of. Then, by a like prodigious stroke of
+      volition, the inhabitants of the enchanted island universally agree that
+      there is a class of them which can be called out of their names in some
+      sort of title, bestowed by some ancestral or actual prince, and can
+      forthwith be something different from the rest, who shall thenceforth do
+      them reverence, them and their heirs and assigns, forever. By this amusing
+      process, the realm of faery is constituted, a thing which could not have
+      any existence in nature, yet by its existence in fancy becomes the most
+      absolute of human facts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not surprising that, in the conditions which ensue, snobbishness
+      should abound; the surprising thing would be if it did not abound. Even
+      with ourselves, who by a seven years&rsquo; struggle burst the faery dream
+      a century ago, that least erected spirit rears its loathly head from the
+      dust at times, and in our polite press we can read much if we otherwise
+      see nothing of its subtle influence. But no evil is without its
+      compensating good, and the good of English snobbishness is that it has
+      reduced loyalty, whether to the prince or to the patrician, from a
+      political to a social significance. That is, it does so with the upper
+      classes; with the lower, loyalty finds expression in an unparalleled
+      patriotism. An Englishman of the humble or the humbler life may know very
+      well that he is not much in himself; but he believes that England stands
+      for him, and that royalty and nobility stand for England. Both of these,
+      there, are surrounded by an atmosphere of reverence wholly inconceivable
+      to the natives of a country where there are only millionaires to revere.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The most curious thing is that the persons in the faery dream seem to
+      believe it as devoutly as the simplest and humblest of the dreamers. The
+      persons in the dream apparently take themselves as seriously as if there
+      were or could be in reality kings and lords. They could not, of course, do
+      so if they were recently dreamed, as they were, say, in the France of the
+      Third Empire. There, one fancies, these figments must have always been
+      smiling in each other&rsquo;s faces when they were by themselves. But the
+      faery dream holds solidly in England because it is such a very old dream.
+      Besides, the dream does not interfere with the realities; it even honors
+      them. If a man does any great thing in England, the chief figure of the
+      faery dream recognizes his deed, stoops to him, lifts him up among the
+      other figures, and makes him part of the dream forever. After that he has
+      standing, such as no man may have with us for more than that psychological
+      moment, when all the papers cry him up, and then everybody tries to forget
+      him. But, better than this, the dream has the effect, if it has not the
+      fact, of securing every man in his place, so long as he keeps to it.
+      Nowhere else in the world is there so much personal independence, without
+      aggression, as in England. There is apparently nothing of it in Germany;
+      in Italy, every one is so courteous and kind that there is no question of
+      it; in the French Republic and in our own, it exists in an excess that is
+      molestive and invasive; in England alone does it strike the observer as
+      being of exactly the just measure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very likely the observer is mistaken, and in the present case he will not
+      insist. After all, even the surface indications in such matters are slight
+      and few. But what I noted was that, though the simple and humble have to
+      go to the wall, and for the most part go to it unkicking, in England they
+      were, on their level, respectfully and patiently entreated. At a railroad
+      junction one evening, when there was a great hurrying up stairs and down,
+      and a mad seeking of wrong trains by right people, the company&rsquo;s
+      servants who were taking tickets, and directing passengers this way and
+      that, were patiently kind with futile old men and women, who came up, in
+      the midst of their torment, and pestered them with questions as to the
+      time when trains that had not arrived would leave after they did arrive. I
+      shuddered to think what would have at least verbally happened to such
+      inquirers with us; but, there, not only their lives but their feelings
+      were safe, and they could go away with such self-respect as they had quite
+      intact.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In no country less good-hearted than England could anything so
+      wrong-headed as the English baggage system be suffered. But, there,
+      passengers of all kinds help the porters to sort their trunks from other
+      people&rsquo;s trunks, on arrival at their stations, and apparently think
+      it no hardship. The porters, who do not seem especially inspired persons,
+      have a sort of guiding instinct in the matter, and wonderfully seldom fail
+      to get the things together for the cab, or to get them off the cab, and,
+      duly labelled, into the luggage-van. Once, at a great junction, my porter
+      seemed to have missed my train, and after vain but not unconsidered
+      appeals to the guard, I had to start without it. At the next station, the
+      company telegraphed back at its own cost the voluminous message of my
+      anxiety and indignation, and I was assured that the next train would bring
+      my valise from Crewe to Edinburgh. When I arrived at Edinburgh, I casually
+      mentioned my trouble to a guard whom I had not seen before. He asked how
+      the bags were marked, and then he said they had come with us. My porter
+      had run with them to my train, but in despair of getting to my car with
+      his burden, had put them into the last luggage-van, and all I had to do
+      was now to identify them at my journey&rsquo;s end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why one does not, guiltily or guiltlessly, claim other people&rsquo;s
+      baggage, I do not know; but apparently it is not the custom. Perhaps in
+      this, the deference for any one within his rights, peculiar to the faery
+      dream, operates the security of the respective owners of baggage that
+      could otherwise easily be the general prey. While I saw constant regard
+      paid for personal rights, I saw only one case in which they were
+      offensively asserted. This was in starting from York for London, when we
+      attempted to take possession of a compartment we had paid for from the
+      nearest junction, in order to make certain of it. We found it in the
+      keeping of a gentleman who had turned it from a non-smoking into a smoking
+      compartment, and bestrewn it with his cigar ashes. When told by the
+      porters that we had engaged the compartment, he refused to stir, and said
+      that he had paid for his seat, and he should not leave it till he was
+      provided with another. In vain they besought him to consider our hard
+      case, in being kept out of our own, and promised him another place as good
+      as the one he held. He said that he would not believe it till he saw it,
+      and as he would not go to see it, and it could not be brought to him,
+      there appeared little chance of our getting rid of him. I thought it best
+      to let him and the porters fight it out among themselves. When a force of
+      guards appeared, they were equally ineffective against the intruder, who
+      could not, or did not, say that he did not know the compartment was
+      engaged. Suddenly, for no reason, except that he had sufficiently stood,
+      or sat, upon his rights, he rose, and the others precipitated themselves
+      upon his hand-baggage, mainly composed of fishing-tackle, such as a
+      gentleman carries who has been asked to somebody&rsquo;s fishing, and bore
+      it away to another part of the train. They left one piece behind, and the
+      porter who came back for it was radiantly smiling, as if the struggle had
+      been an agreeable exercise, and he spoke of his antagonist without the
+      least exasperation; evidently, he regarded him as one who had justly
+      defended himself from corporate aggression; his sympathies were with him
+      rather than with us, perhaps because we had not so vigorously asserted
+      ourselves.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      A case in which a personal wrong rather than a personal right was
+      offensively asserted, was that of a lady, young and too fair to be so
+      unfair, in a crowded train coming from the Doncaster Races to York. She
+      had kept a whole first-class compartment to herself, putting her maid into
+      the second-class adjoining, and heaping the vacant seats with her
+      hand-baggage, which had also overflowed into the corridor. At the time the
+      train started she was comforting herself in her luxurious solitude with a
+      cup of tea, and she stood up, as if to keep other people out. But, after
+      waiting, seven of us, in the corridor, until she should offer to admit us,
+      we all swarmed in upon her, and made ourselves indignantly at home. When
+      it came to that she offered no protest, but gathered up her belongings,
+      and barricaded herself with them. Among the rest there was a
+      typewriting-machine, but what manner of young lady she was, or whether of
+      the journalistic or the theatrical tribe, has never revealed itself to
+      this day. We could not believe that she was very high-born, not nearly so
+      high, for instance, as the old lady who helped dispossess her, and who,
+      when we ventured the hope that it would not rain on the morrow, which was
+      to be St. Leger Day, almost lost the kindness for us inspired by some
+      small service, because we had the bad taste to suggest such a possibility
+      for so sacred a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I never saw people standing in a train, except that once which I have
+      already noted, when in a very crowded car in Wales, two women, decent
+      elderly persons, got in and were suffered to remain on foot by the young
+      men who had comfortable places; no one dreamed, apparently, of offering to
+      give up his seat. But, on the other hand, a superior civilization is shown
+      in what I may call the manual forbearance of the trolley and railway folk,
+      who are so apt to nudge and punch you at home here, when they wish your
+      attention. The like happened to me only once in England, and that was at
+      Liverpool, where the tram conductor, who laid hands on me instead of
+      speaking, had perhaps been corrupted by the unseen American influences of
+      a port at which we arrive so abundantly and indiscriminately. I did not
+      resent the touch, though it is what every one is expected to do, if
+      aggrieved, and every one else does it in England. Within his rights, every
+      one is safe; though there may be some who have no rights. If there were, I
+      did not see them, and I suppose that, as an alien, I might have refused to
+      stand up and uncover when the band began playing <i>God Save the King</i>,
+      as it did at the end of every musical occasion; I might have urged that,
+      being no subject of the King, I did not feel bound to join in the general
+      prayer. But that would have been churlish, and, where every one had been
+      so civil to me, I did not see why I should not be civil to the King, in a
+      small matter. In the aggregate indeed, it is not a small matter, and I
+      suppose that the stranger always finds the patriotism of a country
+      molestive. Patriotism is, at any rate, very disagreeable, with the sole
+      exception of our own, which we are constantly wishing to share with other
+      people, especially with English people. We spare them none of it, even in
+      their own country, and yet many of us object to theirs; I feel that I am
+      myself being rather offensive about it, now, at this distance from them.
+      Upon the whole, not caring very actively for us, one way or the other,
+      they take it amiably; they try to get our point of view, and, as if it
+      were a thorn, self-sacrificially press their bosoms against it, in the
+      present or recent <i>entente cordiale</i>. None of their idiosyncrasies is
+      more notable than their patience, their kindness with our divergence from
+      them; but I am not sure that, having borne with us when we are by, they do
+      not take it out of us when we are away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are the poetry of a few, who, we like to think, have studied the most
+      deeply into the causes of our being, or its excuses. But you cannot always
+      be enjoying poetry, and I could well imagine that our lovers must
+      sometimes prefer to shut the page. The common gentleness comes from the
+      common indifference, and from something else that I will not directly
+      touch upon. What is certain is that, with all manner of strangers, the
+      English seem very gentle, when they meet in chance encounter. The average
+      level of good manners is high. My experience was not the widest, and I am
+      always owning it was not deep; but, such as it was, it brought me to the
+      distasteful conviction that in England I did not see the mannerless
+      uncouthness which I often see in America, not so often from high to low,
+      or from old to young, but the reverse. There may be much more than we
+      infer, at the moment, from the modulated voices, which sweetens casual
+      intercourse, but there are certain terms of respect, almost unknown to us,
+      which more obviously do that effect. It is a pity that democracy, being
+      the fine thing it essentially is, should behave so rudely. Must we come to
+      family government, in order to be filial or fraternal in our bearing with
+      one another? Why should we be so blunt, so sharp, so ironical, so brutal
+      in our kindness?
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The single-mindedness of the English is beautiful. It may not help to the
+      instant understanding of our jokes; but then, even we are not always
+      joking, and it does help to put us at rest and to make us feel safe. The
+      Englishman may not always tell the truth, but he makes us feel that we are
+      not so sincere as he; perhaps there are many sorts of sincerity. But there
+      is something almost caressing in the kindly pause that precedes his
+      perception of your meaning, and this is very pleasing after the sense of
+      always having your hearer instantly onto you. When, by a chance
+      indefinitely rarer than it is with us at home, one meets an Irishman in
+      England, or better still an Irishwoman, there is an instant lift of the
+      spirit; and, when one passes the Scotch border, there is so much lift
+      that, on returning, one sinks back into the embrace of the English
+      temperament, with a sigh for the comfort of its soft unhurried expectation
+      that there is really something in what you say which, will be clear
+      by-and-by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having said so much as this in compliance with the frequent American
+      pretence that the English are without humor, I wish to hedge in the
+      interest of truth. They certainly are not so constantly joking as we; it
+      does not apparently seem to them that fate can be propitiated by a habit
+      of pleasantry, or that this is so merry a world that one need go about
+      grinning in it. Perhaps the conditions with most of them are harder than
+      the conditions with most of us. But, thinking of certain Englishmen I have
+      known, I should be ashamed to join in the cry of those story-telling
+      Americans whose jokes have sometimes fallen effectless. It is true that,
+      wherever the Celt has leavened the doughier Anglo-Saxon lump, the
+      expectation of a humorous sympathy is greater; but there are subtile
+      spirits of Teutonic origin whose fineness we cannot deny, whose delicate
+      gayety is of a sort which may well leave ours impeaching itself of a
+      heavier and grosser fibre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt you must sometimes, and possibly oftenest, go more than half-way
+      for the response to your humorous intention. Those subtile spirits are
+      shy, and may not offer it an effusive welcome. They are also of such an
+      exquisite honesty that, if they do not think your wit is funny, they will
+      not smile at it, and this may grieve some of our jokers. But, if you have
+      something fine and good in you, you need not be afraid they will fail of
+      it, and they will not be so long about finding it out as some travellers
+      say. When it comes to the grace of the imaginative in your pleasantry,
+      they will be even beforehand with you. But in their extreme of
+      impersonality they will leave the initiative to you in the matter of humor
+      as in others. They will no more seek out your peculiar humor than they
+      will name you in speaking with you.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Nothing in England seeks you out, except the damp. Your impressions, you
+      have to fight for them. What you see or hear seems of accident. The sort
+      of people you have read of your whole life, and are most intimate with in
+      fiction, you must surprise. They no more court observance than the birds
+      in whose seasonable slaughter society from the King down delights. In
+      fact, it is probable that, if you looked for both, you would find the
+      gunner shyer than the gunned. The pheasant and the fox are bred to give
+      pleasure by their chase; they are tenderly cared for and watched over and
+      kept from harm at the hands of all who do not wish to kill them for the
+      joy of killing, and they are not so elusive but they can be seen by easy
+      chance. The pheasant especially has at times all but the boldness of the
+      barnyard in his fearless port. Once from my passing train, I saw him
+      standing in the middle of a ploughed field, erect, distinct, like a statue
+      of himself, commemorative of the long ages in which his heroic death and
+      martyr sufferance have formed the pride of princes and the peril of
+      poachers. But I never once saw him shot, though almost as many gunners
+      pursue him as there are pheasants in the land. This alone shows how shy
+      the gunners are; and when once I saw the trail of a fox-hunt from the same
+      coign of vantage without seeing the fox, I felt that I had almost
+      indecently come upon the horse and hounds, and that the pink coats and the
+      flowery spread of the dappled dogs over the field were mine by a kind of
+      sneak as base as killing a fox to save my hens.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IX
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Equally with the foxes and the pheasants, the royalties and nobilities
+      abound in English novels, which really form the chief means of our
+      acquaintance with English life; but the chances that reveal them to the
+      average unintroduced, unpresented American are rarer. By these chances, I
+      heard, out of the whole peerage, but one lord so addressed in public, and
+      that was on a railroad platform where a porter was reassuring him about
+      his luggage. Similarly, I once saw a lady of quality, a tall and girlish
+      she, who stood beside her husband, absently rubbing with her glove the
+      window of her motor, and whom but for the kind interest of our cabman we
+      might never have known for a duchess. It is by their personal uninsistence
+      largely, no doubt, that the monarchy and the aristocracy exist; the
+      figures of the faery dream remain blent with the background, and appear
+      from it only when required to lay cornerstones, or preside at races, or
+      teas or bazars, or to represent the masses at home and abroad, and
+      invisibly hold the viewless reins of government.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet it must not be supposed that the commoner sort of dreamers are never
+      jealous of these figments of their fancy. They are often so, and rouse
+      themselves to self-assertion as frequently as our Better Element flings
+      off the yoke of Tammany. At a fair, open to any who would pay, for some
+      forgotten good object, such as is always engaging the energies of society,
+      I saw moving among the paying guests the tall form of a nobleman who had
+      somehow made himself so distasteful to his neighbors that they were not
+      his friends, and regularly voted down his men, whether they stood for
+      Parliament or County Council, and whether they were better than the
+      popular choice or not. As a matter of fact, it was said that they were
+      really better, but the people would not have them because they were his;
+      and one of the theories of English manliness is that the constant pressure
+      from above has toughened the spirit and enabled Englishmen to stand up
+      stouter and straighter each in his place, just as it is contended
+      elsewhere that the aesthetic qualities of the human race have been
+      heightened by its stresses and deprivations in the struggle of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For my own part, I believe neither the one theory nor the other. People
+      are the worse for having people above them, and are the ruder and coarser
+      for having to fight their way. If the triumph of social inequality is such
+      that there are not four men in London who are not snobs, it cannot boast
+      itself greater than the success of economic inequality with ourselves,
+      among whom the fight for money has not produced of late a first-class
+      poet, painter, or sculptor. The English, if they are now the manliest
+      people under the sun, have to thank not their masters but themselves, and
+      a nature originally so generous that no abuse could lastingly wrong it, no
+      political absurdity spoil it. But if this nature had been left free from
+      the beginning, we might see now a nation of Englishmen who, instead of
+      being bound so hard and fast in the bonds of an imperial patriotism, would
+      be the first in a world-wide altruism. Yet their patriotism is so devout
+      that it may well pass itself off upon them for a religious emotion,
+      instead of the superstition which seems to the stranger the implication of
+      an England in the next world as well as in this.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      X
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We fancy that, because we have here an Episcopal Church, with its
+      hierarchy, we have something equivalent to the English Church. But that is
+      a mistake. The English Church is a part of the whole of English life, as
+      the army or navy is; in English crowds, the national priest is not so
+      frequent as the national soldier, but he is of as marked a quality, and as
+      distinct from the civil world, in uniform, bearing, and aspect; in the
+      cathedral towns, he and his like form a sort of spiritual garrison. At
+      home here you may be ignorant of the feasts of the Episcopal Church
+      without shame or inconvenience; but in England you had better be versed in
+      the incidence of all the holy days if you would stand well with other men,
+      and would know accurately when the changes in the railroad time-tables
+      will take place. It will not do to have ascertained the limits of Lent;
+      you must be up in the Michaelmases and Whitmondays, and the minor saints&rsquo;
+      days. When once you have mastered this difficult science, you will realize
+      what a colossal transaction the disestablishment of the English Church in
+      England would be, and how it would affect the whole social fabric.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, even when you have learned your lesson, it will not be to you as that
+      knowledge which has been lived, and which has no more need ever to
+      question itself than the habitual pronunciation of words. If one has moved
+      in good English society, one has no need ever to ask how a word is
+      pronounced, far less to go to the dictionary; one pronounces it as one has
+      always heard it pronounced. The sense of this gives the American a sort of
+      despair, like that of a German or French speaking foreigner, who perceives
+      that he never will be able to speak English. The American is rather worse
+      off, for he has to subdue an inward rebellion, and to form even the wish
+      to pronounce some English words as the English do. He has, for example,
+      always said &ldquo;financier,&rdquo; with the accent on the last syllable;
+      and if he has consulted his Webster he has found that there was no choice
+      for him. Then, when he hears it pronounced at Oxford by the head of a
+      college with the accent on the second syllable, and learns on asking that
+      it is never otherwise accented in England, his head whirls a little, and
+      he has a sick moment, in which he thinks he had better let the verb
+      &ldquo;to be&rdquo; govern the accusative as the English do, and be done
+      with it, or else telegraph for his passage home at once. Or stop! He must
+      not &ldquo;telegraph,&rdquo; he must &ldquo;wire.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      As for that breathing in the wrong place which is known as dropping one&rsquo;s
+      aitches, I found that in the long time between the first and last of my
+      English sojourns, there had arisen the theory that it was a vice purely
+      cockney in origin, and that it had grown upon the nation through the
+      National Schools. It is grossly believed, or boldly pretended, that till
+      the National School teachers had conformed to the London standard in their
+      pronunciation the wrong breathing was almost unknown in England, but that
+      now it was heard everywhere south of the Scottish border. Worse yet, the
+      teachers in the National Schools had scattered far and wide that peculiar
+      intonation, that droll slip or twist of the vowel sounds by which the
+      cockney alone formerly proclaimed his low breeding, and the infection is
+      now spread as far as popular learning. Like the wrong breathing, it is
+      social death &ldquo;to any he that utters it,&rdquo; not indeed that swift
+      extinction which follows having your name crossed by royalty from the list
+      of guests at a house where royalty is about to visit, but a slow,
+      insidious malady, which preys upon its victim, and finally destroys him
+      after his life-long struggle to shake it off. It is even worse than the
+      wrong breathing, and is destined to sweep the whole island, where you can
+      nowhere, even now, be quite safe from hearing a woman call herself &ldquo;a
+      lydy.&rdquo; It may indeed be the contagion of the National School
+      teacher, but I feel quite sure, from long observation of the wrong
+      breathing, that the wrong breathing did not spread from London through the
+      schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of the unbred in
+      England as nasality is with us. Both infirmities are of national origin
+      and extent, and both are individual or personal in their manifestation.
+      That is, some Americans in every part of the Union talk through their
+      noses; some Englishmen in every part of the kingdom drop their aitches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The English-speaking Welsh often drop their aitches, as the
+      English-speaking French do, though the Scotch and Irish never drop them,
+      any more than the Americans, or the English of the second generation among
+      us; but the extremely interesting and great little people of Wales are
+      otherwise as unlike the English as their mother-language is. They seem
+      capable of doing anything but standing six feet in their stockings, which
+      is such a very common achievement with the English, but that is the fault
+      of nature which gave them dark complexions and the English fair. Where the
+      work of the spirit comes in, it effects such a difference between the two
+      peoples as lies between an Eisteddfod and a horse-race. While all the
+      singers of Wales met in artistic emulation at their national musical
+      festival at Rhyl, all the gamblers of England met in the national pastime
+      of playing the horses at Doncaster. More money probably changed hands on
+      the events at Doncaster than at Rhyl, and it was characteristic of the
+      prevalent influence in the common civilization (if there is a civilization
+      common to both races) that the King was at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. But
+      I do not say this to his disadvantage, for I was myself at Doncaster and
+      not at Rhyl. You cannot, unless you have a very practised ear, say which
+      is the finer singer at an Eisteddfod, but almost any one can see which
+      horse comes in first at a race.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      What is most striking in the mixture of strains in England is that it
+      apparently has not ultimately mixed them; and perhaps after a thousand
+      years the racial traits will be found marking Americans as persistently.
+      We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be assimilating, the different
+      voluntary and involuntary immigrations; but doubtless after two thousand
+      years the African, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Gaul, the
+      Hun, the Latin, the Slav will be found atavistically asserting his origin
+      in certain of their common posterity. The Pennsylvania Germans have as
+      stolidly maintained their identity for two centuries as the Welsh in Great
+      Britain for twenty, or, so far as history knows, from the beginning of
+      time. The prejudices of one British stock concerning another are as lively
+      as ever, apparently, however the enmities may have worn themselves away.
+      One need not record any of these English prejudices concerning the Scotch
+      or Irish; they are too well known; but I may set down the opinion of a
+      lively companion in a railroad journey that the Welsh are &ldquo;the prize
+      liars of the universe.&rdquo; He was an expert accountant by profession,
+      and his affairs took him everywhere in the three Kingdoms, and this was
+      his settled error; for the Welsh themselves know that, if they sometimes
+      seem the prey of a lively imagination, it is the philologically noted
+      fault of their language, which refuses to lend itself to the accurate
+      expression of fact, but which would probably afford them terms for
+      pronouncing the statement of my accountant inexact. He was perhaps a man
+      of convictions rather than conclusions, for, though he was a bright
+      intelligence, of unusually varied interests, there were things that had
+      never appealed to him. We praised together the lovely September landscape
+      through which we were running, and I ventured some remark upon the large
+      holdings of the land: a thing that always saddened me in the face of
+      nature with the reflection that those who tilled the soil owned none of
+      it; though I ought to have remembered the times when the soil owned them,
+      and taken heart. My notion seemed to strike him for the first time, but he
+      dismissed the fact as a necessary part of the English system; it had never
+      occurred to him that there could be question of that system. There must be
+      many Englishmen to whom it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet
+      them you cannot blame the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancied that one of the Englishmen to whom it might have occurred was he
+      whom I met in Wales at Aberystwyth, where we spoke together a moment in
+      the shadow of the co-educational University there, and who seemed at least
+      of a different mind concerning the Welsh. &ldquo;These Welsh farmers,&rdquo;
+      he said, &ldquo;send their sons and daughters to college as if it were
+      quite the natural thing to do. But just imagine a Dorsetshire peasant
+      sending his boy to a University!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We suppose that the large holdings of land are the effect of wrongs and
+      abuses now wholly in the past, and that the causes for their increase are
+      no longer operative, but are something like those geological laws by which
+      the strata under them formed themselves. Once, however, in driving through
+      the most beautiful part of England, which I will not specify because every
+      part of England is the most beautiful, I came upon an illustration of the
+      reverse, as signal as the spectacle of a landslide. It was the
+      accumulation, not merely within men&rsquo;s memories, but within the
+      actual generation, of vast bodies of land in the hold of a great nobleman
+      who had contrived a title in them by the simple device of enclosing the
+      people&rsquo;s commons. It was a wrong, but there was no one of the
+      wronged who was brave enough or rich enough to dispute it through the
+      broken law, and no witness public-spirited enough to come to their aid.
+      Such things make us think patiently, almost proudly, of our national
+      foible of graft, which may really be of feudal origin. Doubtless the
+      aggression was attacked in the press, but we all know what the attacks of
+      the press amount to against the steadfast will of a powerful corporation,
+      and a great nobleman in England is a powerful corporation. In this
+      instance he had not apparently taken the people&rsquo;s land without some
+      wish to make them a return for it. He had built a handsome road through
+      their property, which he maintained in splendid condition, and he allowed
+      them to drive over his road, and to walk freely in certain portions of
+      their woods. He had also built a magnificent hospital for them, and it
+      seemed rather hard, then, to hear that one of the humblest of them had
+      been known to speak of him in whispered confidence as a &ldquo;Upas tree.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Probably he was not personally a Upas tree, probably the rancor toward him
+      left from being bawled after by one of his gatemen at a turning we had
+      taken in his enclosure, &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a private path!&rdquo; was
+      unjust. There was no sign, such as everywhere in England renders a place
+      secure from intrusion. The word &ldquo;Private&rdquo; painted up anywhere
+      does the effect of bolts and bars and of all obsolete man-traps beyond it,
+      and is not for a moment that challenge to the wayfaring foot which it
+      seems so often with us; but the warnings to the public which we make so
+      mandatory, the English language with unfailing gentleness. You are not
+      told to keep your foot or your wheel to a certain pathway; you are &ldquo;requested,&rdquo;
+      and sometimes even &ldquo;kindly requested&rdquo;; I do not know but once
+      I was &ldquo;respectfully requested.&rdquo; Perhaps that nobleman&rsquo;s
+      possession of these lands was so new that his retainers had to practise
+      something of unwonted rudeness in keeping it wholly his where he chose. At
+      any rate, the rule of civility is so universal that the politeness from
+      class to class is, for what the stranger sees, all but unfailing. I dare
+      say he does not see everything, even the Argus-eyed American, but
+      apparently the manners of the lower class, where they have been touched by
+      the upper, have been softened and polished to the same consistence and
+      complexion. When it comes to the proffers, and refusals, and insistences,
+      and acceptances between people of condition, such as I witnessed once in a
+      crowded first-class carriage from London on an Oxford holiday, nothing
+      could be more gently urgent, more beautifully forbearing. If the writers
+      of our romantic novels could get just those manners into their fiction, I
+      should not mind their dealing so much with the English nobility and
+      gentry; for those who intend being our nobility and gentry, by-and-by,
+      could not do better than study such high-breeding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we approach the morals of either superiors or inferiors, we are in a
+      region where it behooves us to tread carefully. To be honest, I know
+      nothing about them, and I will not assume to know anything. I heard from
+      authority which I could not suspect of posing for omniscience that the
+      English rustics were apt to be very depraved, but they may on the other
+      hand be saints for all that I can prove against them. They are
+      superstitious, it is said, and there are few villages or old houses that
+      have not their tutelary spectres. The belief in ghosts is almost universal
+      among the people; as I may allow without superiority, for I do not know
+      but I believe in them myself, and there are some million of American
+      spiritualists who make an open profession of faith in them. It is said
+      also that the poor in England are much spoiled by the constant aid given
+      them in charity. This is supposed to corrupt them, and to make them
+      dependent upon the favors of fortune, rather than the sweat of their
+      brows. On the other hand, they often cannot get work, as I infer from the
+      armies of the unemployed, and, in these cases, I cannot hold them greatly
+      to blame if they bless their givers by their readiness to receive. If one
+      may infer from the incessant beneficences, and the constant demands for
+      more and more charities, one heaped upon another, there are more good
+      objects in England than anywhere else under the sun, for one only gives to
+      good objects, of course. The oppression of the subscriptions is tempered
+      by the smallness of the sum which may satisfy them. &ldquo;Five shillings
+      is a subscription,&rdquo; said a friend who was accused of really always
+      giving five pounds.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XIV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The English rich do not give so spectacularly as our rich do&mdash;that
+      is, by handfuls of millions, but then the whole community gives more, I
+      think, than our community does, and when it does not give, the necessary
+      succor is taxed out of its incomes and legacies. I do not mean that there
+      is no destitution, but only that the better off seem to have the worse off
+      more universally and perpetually in mind than with us. All this is
+      believed to be very demoralizing to the poor, and doubtless the certainty
+      of soup and flannel is bad for the soul of an old woman whose body is
+      doubled up with rheumatism. The Church seems to blame for much of the evil
+      that ensues from giving something to people who have nothing; but I dare
+      say the Dissenters are also guilty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just how much is wanted to stay the stomach of a healthy pauper, it would
+      be hard to say; but now and then the wayfarer gets some hint of the
+      frequency if not the amount of feeding among the poor who are able to feed
+      themselves. One day, in the outskirts&mdash;they were very tattered and
+      draggled&mdash;of Liverpool, we stopped at a pastry-shop, where the kind
+      woman &ldquo;thought she could accommodate&rdquo; us with a cup of tea,
+      though she was terribly pressed with custom from all sorts of minute maids
+      and small boys coming in for &ldquo;penn&rsquo;orths&rdquo; of that
+      frightful variety of tart and cake which dismays the beholder from
+      innumerable shop windows in England. When we were brought our safer
+      refection, we noted her activities to the hostess, and she said, &ldquo;Yes,
+      they all want a bit of cake with their tea, even the poorest&rdquo;; and
+      when we ventured our supposition that they made their afternoon tea the
+      last meal of the day, she laughed at the notion. &ldquo;Last meal! They
+      have a good supper before they go to bed. Indeed, they all want their four
+      meals a day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another time, thriftily running in a third-class carriage from Crewe to
+      Chester, I was joined by a friendly man who addressed me with the frank
+      cordiality of the lower classes in recognizing one of their sort. &ldquo;They
+      don&rsquo;t know how to charge!&rdquo; he said, with an irony that
+      referred to the fourpence he had been obliged to pay for a cup of station
+      tea; and when I tried to allege some mitigating facts in behalf of the
+      company, he readily became autobiographical. The transition from tea to
+      eating generally was easy, and he told me that he was a plumber, going to
+      do a job of work at Llandudno, where he had to pay fourteen bob, which I
+      knew to be shillings and mentally translated into $3.50, a week for his
+      board. His wages were $1.50 a day, which the reader who multiplies
+      fourpence by twenty, to make up the difference in money values, will find
+      to be the wages of a good mechanic in the first Edward&rsquo;s time, five
+      hundred years ago. On this he professed to live very well. He rose every
+      morning at half-past four, and at six he had a breakfast of bread, butter,
+      and coffee; at nine he had porridge and coffee; at one, he had soup, meat,
+      and eggs, and perhaps beer; at night, after he got home from work, he had
+      a stew and a bit of meat, and perhaps beer, with Mother. He thought that
+      English people ate too much, generally, and especially on Sunday, when
+      they had nothing else to do. Most men never came home without asking,
+      &ldquo;Well, Mother, what have you got for me to eat now?&rdquo; When I
+      remembered how sparely our farm people and mechanics fared, I thought that
+      he was right, or they were wrong; for the puzzling fact remained that they
+      looked gaunt and dyspeptic, and he hale and fresh, though the difference
+      may have had as much to do with the air as the food. I liked him, and I
+      cannot leave him without noting that he was of the lean-faced, slightly
+      aquiline British type, with a light mustache; he was well dressed and well
+      set up, and he spoke strongly, as North Britons do, with nothing of our
+      people&rsquo;s husky whine. I found him on further acquaintance of
+      anti-Chamberlain politics, pro-Boer as to the late war, and rather
+      socialistic. He blamed the labor men for not choosing labor men to office
+      instead of the gentry who offered themselves. He belonged to a plumbers&rsquo;
+      union, and he had nothing to complain of, but he inferred that the
+      working-man was better off in America, from the fact that none of his
+      friends who had gone to the States ever came home to stay, though they
+      nearly all came home for a holiday, sooner or later. He differed from my
+      other friend, the accountant, in being very fond of the Welsh; it must be
+      owned their race seemed to have acquired merit with him through the tip of
+      two sovereigns which his last employer in Llandudno had given him. On the
+      other hand, he had no love for the Italians who were coming in, especially
+      at Glasgow. In Glasgow, he said, there were more drunken women than
+      anywhere else in the world, though there was no public-house drinking with
+      them as in London. This, so far as I got at it, formed his outlook on
+      life, but I dare say there was more of it.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I was always regretting that I got at the people so little, and that only
+      chance hints of what they were thinking and feeling reached me. Now and
+      then, a native observer said something about them which seemed luminous.
+      &ldquo;We are frightfully feudal,&rdquo; such an observer said, &ldquo;especially
+      the poor.&rdquo; He did not think it a fault, I believe, and only used his
+      adverb intensifyingly, for he was of a Tory mind. He meant the poor among
+      the country people, who have at last mastered that principle of the feudal
+      system which early enabled the great nobles to pay nothing for the
+      benefits they enjoyed from it. But my other friend, the plumber, was not
+      the least feudal, or not so feudal as many a lowly ward-heeler in New
+      York, who helps to make up the muster of some captain of politics, under
+      the lead of a common boss. The texture of society, in the smarter sense,
+      the narrower sense, is what I could not venture to speak of more
+      confidently. Once I asked a friend, a very dear and valued friend, whether
+      a man&rsquo;s origin or occupation would make any difference in his social
+      acceptance, if he were otherwise interesting and important. He seemed not
+      to know what I would be at, and, when he understood, he responded with
+      almost a shout of amazement, &ldquo;Oh, not the least in the world!&rdquo;
+      But I have my doubts still; and I should say that it might be as difficult
+      for a very cultivated and agreeable man servant to get on in London
+      society, as for an artist or poet to feel at home in the first circles of
+      New York. Possibly, however, London society, because of its almost
+      immeasurable vastness, can take in more of more sorts of people, without
+      the consciousness of differences which keeps our own first circles so
+      elect. I venture, somewhat wildly, somewhat unwarrantably, the belief that
+      English society is less sensitive to moral differences than ours, and that
+      people with their little <i>taches</i> would find less anxiety in London
+      than in New York lest they should come off on the people they rubbed
+      against. Some Americans, who, even with our increasing prevalence of
+      divorces, are not well seen at home, are cheerfully welcomed in England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps, there, all Americans, good and bad, high and low, coarse and
+      fine, are the same to senses not accustomed to our varying textures and
+      shades of color; that is a matter I should be glad to remand to the
+      psychologist, who will have work enough to do if he comes to inquire into
+      such mysteries. One can never be certain just how the English take us, or
+      how much, or whether they take us at all. Oftenest I was inclined to think
+      that we were imperceptible to them, or that, when we were perceptible,
+      they were aware of us as Swedenborg says the most celestial angels are
+      aware of evil spirits, merely as something angular. Americans were
+      distressful to their consciousness, they did not know why; and then they
+      tried to ignore us. But perhaps this is putting it a little fantastically.
+      What I know is that one comes increasingly to reserve the fact of one&rsquo;s
+      nationality, when it is not essential to the occasion, and to become as
+      much as possible an unknown quality, rather than a quality aggressive or
+      positive. Sometimes, when I could feel certain of my ground, I ventured my
+      conviction that Englishmen were not so much interested in Americans as
+      those Americans who stayed at home were apt to think; but when I once
+      expressed this belief to a Unitarian minister, whom I met in the West of
+      England, he received it with surprise and refusal. He said that in his own
+      immediate circle, at least, his friends were interested and increasingly
+      interested in America, what she was and what she meant to be, and still
+      looked toward her for the lead in certain high things which Englishmen
+      have ceased to expect of themselves. My impression is that most of the
+      most forward of the English Sociologists regard America as a back number
+      in those political economics which imply equality as well as liberty in
+      the future. They do not see any difference between our conditions and
+      theirs, as regards the man who works for his living with his hands, except
+      that wages are higher with us, and that physically there is more
+      elbow-room, though mentally and morally there is not. Save a little in my
+      Unitarian minister, and this only conjecturally, I did not encounter that
+      fine spirit which in Old England used to imagine the New World we have not
+      quite turned out to be; but once I met an Englishman who had lived in
+      Canada, and who, gentleman-bred as he was, looked back with fond
+      homesickness to the woods where he had taken up land, and built himself a
+      personable house, chiefly with his own hands. He had lived himself out of
+      touch with his old English life in that new country, and had drawn breath
+      in an opener and livelier air which filled his lungs as the home
+      atmosphere never could again.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XVI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Yet he was standing stiffly up for himself, and strewing his convictions
+      and opinions broadcast as the English all do when pressed by circumstance,
+      while we, with none of their shyness, mostly think our thoughts to
+      ourselves. I suppose we do it because we like better than they to seem of
+      one effect with the rest of our kind. In England one sees a variety of
+      dress in men which one rarely sees at home. They dress there not only in
+      keeping with their work and their play, but in the indulgence of any freak
+      of personal fancy, so that in the street of a provincial town, like Bath,
+      for instance, you will encounter in a short walk a greater range of
+      trousers, leggings, caps, hats, coats, jackets, collars, scarfs, boots and
+      shoes, of tan and black, than you would meet at home in a month of
+      Sundays. The differences do not go to the length of fashions, such as
+      reduce our differences to uniformity, and clothe, say, our legs in
+      knickerbockers till it is found everybody is wearing them, when
+      immediately nobody wears them. Only ladies, of fashions beyond men&rsquo;s,
+      gratify caprices like ours, and even these perhaps not voluntarily. In the
+      obedience they show to the rule that they must never wear the same dinner
+      or ball gown twice, it was said (but who can ever find out the truth of
+      such things?) that they sometimes had sent home from the dressmaker&rsquo;s
+      a number of dresses on liking, and wore them in succession, only to return
+      them, all but one at least, as not liked, the dressmaker having found her
+      account in her work being shown in society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0266}.jpg" alt="{0266}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0266}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      I do not know just what is to be inferred from a social fact or statement
+      like this, but I may say that the devotion to an ideal of social position
+      is far deeper with the English than with us. Whether we spend more or not,
+      I believe that the English live much nearer their incomes than Americans
+      do. I think that we save more out of our earnings than they out of theirs,
+      and that in this we are more like the Continental peoples, the French or
+      the Italians. They spend vastly more on state than we do, because, for one
+      thing, they have more state to spend on. A man may continue to make money
+      in America, and not change his manner of living till he chooses, and he
+      may never change it. Such a thing could not happen to an Englishwoman as
+      happened to the elderly American housewife who walked through the
+      magnificent house which her husband had bought to surprise her, and sighed
+      out at last, &ldquo;Well, now I suppose I shall have to keep a girl!&rdquo;
+      The girl would have been kept from the beginning of her husband&rsquo;s
+      prosperity, and multiplied, till the house was full of servants. If you
+      have the means of a gentleman in England, you must live like a gentleman,
+      apparently; you cannot live plainly, and put by, and largely you must
+      trust to your life-insurance as the fortune you will leave your heirs. It
+      cannot be denied that the more generous expenditure of the English adds to
+      the grace of life, and that they are more hospitable according to their
+      means than we are; or than those Continental peoples who are not
+      hospitable at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A thing that one feels more and more irritatingly in England is that,
+      while with other foreigners we stand on common ground, where we may be as
+      unlike them as we choose, with the English we always stand on English
+      ground, where we can differ only at our peril, and to our disadvantage. A
+      person speaking English and bearing an English name, had better be
+      English, for if he cannot it shows, it proves, that there is something
+      wrong in him. Our misfortune is that our tradition, and perhaps our
+      inclination, obliges us to be un-English, whereas we do not trouble
+      ourselves to be un-French, or un-Italian, for we are so by nature. The
+      effort involved in distinguishing ourselves breeds a sort of annoyance, or
+      call it no more than uneasiness, which is almost as bad as a bad
+      conscience; and in our sense of hopeless perdition we turn vindictively
+      upon our judge. But that is not fair and it is not wise; he does not mean
+      to be our judge, except when he comes to us for the purpose; in his own
+      house, he is civilly unaware of putting us to any test whatever. If you
+      ask him whether he likes this thing or that of ours, he will tell you
+      frankly; he never can see why he should not be frank; he has a kind of
+      helplessness in always speaking the truth; and he does not try to make it
+      palatable.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XVII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      An English Radical, who would say of his King no more than that he was a
+      good little man, and most useful in promoting friendship with France, was
+      inclined to blame us because we did not stay by at the time of our
+      Revolution, and help them fight out as Englishmen the fight for English
+      freedom. He had none of the loyalty of sentiment which so mystifies the
+      American, but plenty of the loyalty of reason, and expected a Utopia which
+      should not be of political but of economical cast. But one was always
+      coming upon illustrations of the loyalty of sentiment with which of course
+      one could have no quarrel, for their patriotism seldom concerned us,
+      except rather handsomely to include us. The French have ceased to be the
+      hereditary enemy, and the Russians have now taken their place in the
+      popular patriotism. I always talked with the lower classes when I could,
+      perhaps because I felt myself near them in my unworthy way, and one
+      evening in a grassy lane I made the acquaintance of a friendly man letting
+      his horse browse the wayside turf. He was in the livery-stable line, but
+      he had been a soldier many years. Upon this episode he became freely
+      autobiographical, especially concerning his service in India. He
+      volunteered the declaration that he had had enough of war, but he added,
+      thoughtfully, &ldquo;I should like to go out for a couple of years if
+      there was any trouble with Russia.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The love of England comes out charmingly in the swarming of English
+      tourists in every part of their country. Americans may sometimes outnumber
+      them at the Continental shrines, but we are in a pitiful minority at the
+      memorable places in England; in fact, we are nowhere beside the natives. I
+      liked their fondness for their own so much that I never could feel the
+      fine scorn for &ldquo;trippers&rdquo; which I believe all persons of
+      condition ought to assume. Even when the trippers did not seem very
+      intelligently interested in what they saw, they were harmlessly employed,
+      for a scene of beauty, or of historic appeal, could not be desecrated by
+      the courtships which are constantly going on all over England, especially
+      at the holiday seasons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The English are, indeed, great holiday-makers, even when past the age of
+      putting their arms around one another&rsquo;s waists. The many and many
+      seaside resorts form the place of their favorite outings, where they try
+      to spend such days and weeks of the late summer as their savings will pay
+      for. It is said that families in very humble station save the year round
+      for these vacations, and, having put by twelve or fifteen pounds, repair
+      to some such waterside as Blackpool, or its analogue in their
+      neighborhood, and lavish them upon the brief joy of the time. They take
+      the cheaper lodgings, and bring with them the less perishable provisions,
+      and lead a life of resolute gayety on the sands and in the sea, and at the
+      pier-ends where the negro minstrels and the Pierrots, who equally abound,
+      make the afternoons and evenings a delight which no one would suspect from
+      their faces to be the wild thing it is. If they go home at the end &ldquo;high
+      sorrowful and cloyed,&rdquo; there is no forecast of it in their demeanor,
+      which is as little troubled as it is animated. The young people are even
+      openly gay, and the robustness of their flirtations adds sensibly to the
+      interest of the spectator. Our own public lovers seem of a humbler sort,
+      and they mostly content themselves with the passive embraces of which
+      every seat in our parks affords an example; but in England such lovers add
+      playful struggles. A favorite pastime seemed to be for one of them to hold
+      something in the hand, and for the other to try prying it open. When it
+      was the young man who kept his hand shut, the struggle could go on almost
+      indefinitely. I suppose it led to many engagements and marriages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the young people were not walking up and down, or playfully
+      scuffling, they were reading novels; in fact, I do not imagine that
+      anywhere else in the world is there a half, or a tenth part, so much
+      fiction consumed as in the English summer resorts. It is probably of the
+      innutritious lightness of pop-corn; I had never the courage to look at the
+      volumes which I could so easily have overlooked; but I am sure it was all
+      out of the circulating library. As there were often several young women to
+      one man, most of the girls had to content themselves with the flirtations
+      in the books, where, I dare say, the heroines were always prying the
+      heroes&rsquo; hands open. On every seat one found them poring upon the
+      glowing page, and met them in every walk with a volume under the arm, and
+      another clasped to the heart. At places where the hand played, and they
+      were ostensibly listening to the music, they were bowed upon their books,
+      and the flutter of the turning leaves almost silenced the blare of the
+      horns. By what inspiration they knew when <i>God Save the King</i> was
+      coming, and rose with a long sigh heaved in common, I should not be able
+      to say. Perhaps they always reached the end of a story at the time the
+      band came to that closing number, or perhaps they felt its imminence in
+      their nerves. The fiction was not confined to the young girls, however.
+      Both sexes and all ages partook of it; I saw as many old girls as young
+      girls reading novels, and mothers of families were apparently as much
+      addicted to the indulgence. I suppose they put by their books when they
+      took tea, which is the other most noticeable dissipation in England. But I
+      cannot enter upon that chapter; it is too large a theme; I will say,
+      merely, that as the saloons are on Sixth Avenue, so the tearooms are in
+      every part of the island.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0272}.jpg" alt="{0272}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0272}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      XVIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It had seemed to me in former visits to England that the Christian Sabbath
+      was a more depressing day there than here, but from the last I have a more
+      cheerful memory of it. I still felt it dispiriting in London, where as
+      many fled from it as could, and where the empty streets symbolized a world
+      abandoned to destruction; but this was mainly in the forenoon. Even then,
+      the markets and fairs in the avenues given up to them were the scenes of
+      an activity which was not without gayety, and certainly not without noise;
+      and when the afternoon came, the lower classes, such as had remained in
+      town, thronged to the public houses, and the upper classes to the evening
+      parade in the Park. As to the relative amount of church-going, I will not
+      even assume to be sure; but I have a fancy that it is a rite much less
+      rigorous than it used to be. Still, in provincial places, I found the
+      churches full on a Sunday morning, and all who could afford it hallowed
+      the day by putting on a frock-coat and a top-hat, which are not worn
+      outside of London on week-days. The women, of course, were always in their
+      best on Sunday. Perhaps in the very country the upper classes go to church
+      as much as formerly, but I have my doubts whether they feel so much
+      obliged to it in conformity to usage, or for the sake of example to their
+      inferiors. Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there
+      are pretty well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive
+      spectacle, and one could imagine people resorting to its functions for
+      aesthetic reasons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, in these guesses, one must remember that the English who remained at
+      home were never Puritanized, never in such measure personally conscienced,
+      as those who came to America in the times of the successive Protestant
+      fervors; and that is a thing which we are apt to forget. The home-keeping
+      English continued, with changes of ritual, much like the peoples who still
+      acknowledged as their head &ldquo;the Bishop of Rome.&rdquo; Their greater
+      morality, if it was greater, was temperamental rather than spiritual, and,
+      leaving the church to look after religion much more than our Puritans did,
+      they kept a simplicity of nature impossible to the sectaries always taking
+      stock of their souls. In fact, the Calvinists of New England were almost
+      essentially different from the Calvinists of Holland, of France, even of
+      Scotland. If our ancestors were the children of light, as they trusted,
+      they were darkened by the forest, into which they plunged, to certain
+      reasons which the children of darkness, as the Puritans believed the
+      non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers from the world about
+      them. There is no denying that with certain great gains, the American
+      Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincialized, and that if they
+      lived in the spirit, they lived in it narrowly, while the others, who
+      lived in the body, lived in it liberally, or at any rate handsomely. From
+      our narrowness we flattered ourselves that we were able to imagine a life
+      more broadly based than theirs, or at least a life from which theirs must
+      look insufficient and unfinal, so long as man feels within himself the
+      prompting to be something better or higher than he is. Yet the English
+      life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery dream of a king supported in
+      his preeminence by a nobility, a nobility supported in turn by a
+      commonalty, a commonalty supported again by a proletariat resting upon
+      immeasurable ether; with a system of government kept, by assent so general
+      that the dissent does not matter, in the hands of a few families reared,
+      if not trained, to power; with a society so intimately and thoroughly
+      self-acquainted that one touch of gossip makes its whole world kin, and
+      responsive to a single emotion; with a charity so wisely studied, and so
+      carefully applied, that restive misery never quite grows rebellious; with
+      a patriotism so inborn and ingrained that all things English seem
+      righteous because English; with a willingness to share the general
+      well-being quite to the verge, but never beyond the verge, of public
+      control of the administration&mdash;with all this, the thing must strike
+      the unbelieving observer as desperately perfect. &ldquo;They have got it
+      down cold,&rdquo; he must say to himself, and confirm himself in his
+      unfaith by reflecting that it is very cold.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XIX
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The best observer of England that ever was, he whose book about the
+      English makes all other comment seem idle and superfluous palaver, that
+      Ralph Waldo Emerson whom we always find ahead of us when we look back for
+      him, was once, as he relates in a closing chapter of English Traits,
+      brought to bay by certain great English friends of his, who challenged him
+      to say whether there really were any Americans with an American idea, and
+      a theory of our future. &ldquo;Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither
+      of Congress, neither of President nor of Cabinet Ministers, nor of such as
+      would make of America another Europe.... I opened the dogma of
+      no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and the
+      fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, It is true that I have
+      never yet seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this
+      truth, and yet ... &lsquo;tis certain, as God liveth, the gun that does
+      not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a
+      clean revolution.... I insisted ... that the manifest absurdity of the
+      view to English feasibility could make no difference to a gentleman; that
+      as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and spinach in London or in
+      Boston, the soul might quote Talleyrand, &lsquo;<i>Messieurs, je n&rsquo;en
+      vois pas la nécessité</i>.&rsquo;&rdquo; In other words, Emerson laid
+      before his great English friends a programme, as nearly as might then be,
+      of philosophical anarchism, and naturally it met with no more acceptance
+      than it would if now presented to the most respectable of his American
+      readers. Yet it is never to be forgotten that it was the English who, with
+      all their weight of feudal tradition, and amidst the nightmares to which
+      their faery dream seemed so long subject, invented the only form of
+      Democratic Christianity the world has yet known, unless indeed the German
+      Mennonites are the same as the earlier English Quakers were in creed and
+      life. In the pseudo-republic of the Cromwellian commonwealth the English
+      had a state as wholly without liberty, equality, and fraternity as in the
+      king-capped oligarchy they had before and have had ever since. We may be
+      sure that they will never have such another commonwealth, or any
+      resembling ours, which can no longer offer itself as an eminent example.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sort of Englishmen, of whose respect Americans can make surest are
+      those English thick-and-thin patriots who admire force and strength, and
+      believe that it is the Anglo-Saxon mission to possess the earth, and to
+      profit by its weaker peoples, not cruelly, not unkindly, yet
+      unquestionably. The Englishmen of whose disrespect we can make surest are
+      those who expect to achieve liberty, equality, and fraternity in the
+      economic way, the political way having failed; who do not care whether the
+      head of the state is born or elected, is called &ldquo;King&rdquo; or
+      called &ldquo;President,&rdquo; since he will presently not be at all; who
+      abhor war, and believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and these
+      only if they work for a living. They have already had their will with the
+      existing English state, until now that state is far more the servant of
+      the people in fetching and carrying, in guarding them from hard masters
+      and succoring them in their need, than the republic which professes to
+      derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. When one
+      encounters this sort of Englishman, one thinks silently of the child labor
+      in the South, of the monopolies in the North, of the companies which
+      govern while they serve us, and one hopes that the Englishman is not
+      silently thinking of them too. He is probably of the lower classes, and
+      one consoles one&rsquo;s self as one can by holding one&rsquo;s head
+      higher in better company, where, without secret self-contempt, one can be
+      more openly proud of our increasing fortunes and our increasing territory,
+      and our warlike adequacy to a first position among the nations of the
+      world. There is no fear that in such company one&rsquo;s national
+      susceptibilities will be wounded, or that one will not be almost as much
+      admired for one&rsquo;s money as at home. I do not say quite, because
+      there are still things in England even more admired than money. Certainly
+      a very rich American would be considered in such English society, but
+      certainly he would not be so much considered as an equally rich Englishman
+      who was also a duke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot name a nobleman of less rank, because I will not belittle my rich
+      countryman, but perhaps the English would think differently, and would
+      look upon him as lower than the latest peer or the newest knight of the
+      King&rsquo;s creation. The King, who has no power, can do almost anything
+      in England; and his touch, which is no longer sovereign for scrofula, can
+      add dignity and give absolute standing to a man whose achievements merit
+      it, but who with us would fail of anything like it. The English system is
+      more logical than ours, but not so reasonable. The English have seen from
+      the beginning inequality and the rule of the few. We can hardly prove that
+      we see, in the future, equality and the rule of the many. Yet our vision
+      is doubtless prophetic, whatever obliquities our frequent astigmatism may
+      impart to it. Meantime, in its ampler range there is room for the play of
+      any misgiving short of denial; but the English cannot doubt the justice of
+      what they have seen without forming an eccentric relation to the actual
+      fact. The Englishman who refuses the formal recognition of his distinction
+      by his prince is the anomaly, not the Englishman who accepts it. Gladstone
+      who declines a peerage is anomalous, not Tennyson who takes it. As part of
+      the English system, as a true believer in the oligarchically administered
+      monarchy, Gladstone was illogical, and Tennyson was logical.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE END
+    </h3>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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@@ -0,0 +1,5551 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Seven English Cities, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Seven English Cities
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7187]
+This file was first posted on March 24, 2003
+Last Updated: April 6, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tricia Gilbert, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES
+
+By W. D. Howells
+
+Illustrated
+
+
+[Illustration: A VIEW OF MONK BAR]
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+   BOOKS OF TRAVEL AND COMMENT BY WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
+
+
+   ROMAN HOLIDAYS............................... net $3.00
+       Traveller's Edition...................... net  3.00
+
+   CERTAIN DELIGHTFUL ENGLISH TOWNS, Ill'd...... net  3.00
+       Traveller's Edition...................... net  3.00
+
+   LONDON FILMS. Illustrated.................... net  2.25
+       Traveller's Edition...................... net  2.25
+
+   A LITTLE SWISS SOJOURN.......................       .50
+
+   MY YEAR IN A LOG CABIN. Illustrated..........       .50
+
+   CRITICISM AND FICTION........................      1.00
+
+   HEROINES OF FICTION. Illustrated............. net  3.75
+
+   IMPRESSIONS AND EXPERIENCES..................      1.50
+
+   LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCE. Ill'd.....      2.50
+
+   LITERATURE AND LIFE.......................... net  2.25
+
+   MODERN ITALIAN POETS. Illustrated............      2.00
+
+   MY LITERARY PASSIONS.........................      1.75
+
+   STOPS OF VARIOUS QUILLS......................      2.50
+        Limited Edition.........................     15.00
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+   A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL
+   SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER
+   IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD
+   NINE DAYS' WONDER IN YORK
+   TWO YORKISH EPISODES
+   A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
+   THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS
+   ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+   LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+   GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ILLUSTRATIONS (not available)
+
+
+   A VIEW OF MONK BAR
+   ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LIVERPOOL
+   THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL
+   THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS
+   MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL
+   TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER
+   THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL
+   TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD
+   YORK MINSTER--THE GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND
+   BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER
+   WALMGATE BAR HAS A BARBICAN
+   ST. MARY'S ABBEY
+   CLIFFORD'S TOWER
+   YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER
+   DURHAM CATHEDRAL--NORTHWEST VIEW
+   FINCHALE PRIORY
+   DURHAM CATHEDRAL--ITS MATCHLESS SEAT ON THE BLUFFS OF THE RIVER
+   THE "STUMP" OF ST. BOTOLPH'S CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY
+   THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND QUINCY MARKET-PLACES
+   THE RIVER AT EVENING
+   LIFTING ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM
+   FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY
+   THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH
+   ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS
+   LLANDUDNO--THE CITY AND HARBOR
+   LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME'S NECK
+   THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO
+   CONWAY CASTLE
+   PLAS MAWR
+   A PRESENTATION AT COURT
+   THE ENGLISH HOUSEMAID
+   LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL
+
+
+Why should the proud stomach of American travel, much tossed in the
+transatlantic voyage, so instantly have itself carried from Liverpool
+to any point where trains will convey it? Liverpool is most worthy to be
+seen and known, and no one who looks up from the bacon and eggs of his
+first hotel breakfast after landing, and finds himself confronted by the
+coal-smoked Greek architecture of St. George's Hall, can deny that it is
+of a singularly noble presence. The city has moments of failing in the
+promise of this classic edifice, but every now and then it reverts to
+it, and reminds the traveller that he is in a great modern metropolis of
+commerce by many other noble edifices.
+
+
+I
+
+Liverpool does not remind him of this so much as the good and true
+Baedeker professes, in the dockside run on the overhead railway (as the
+place unambitiously calls its elevated road); but then, as I noted in my
+account of Southampton, docks have a fancy of taking themselves in,
+and eluding the tourist eye, and even when they "flank the Mersey for a
+distance of 6-7 M." they do not respond to American curiosity so frankly
+as could be wished. They are like other English things in that, however,
+and it must be said for them that when apparent they are sometimes
+unimpressive. From my own note-book, indeed, I find that I pretended to
+think them "wonderful and almost endless," and so I dare say they
+are. But they formed only a very perfunctory interest of our day at
+Liverpool, where we had come to meet, not to take, a steamer.
+
+Our run from London, in the heart of June, was very quick and pleasant,
+through a neat country and many tidy towns. In the meadows the elms
+seemed to droop like our own rather than to hold themselves oakenly
+upright like the English; the cattle stood about in the yellow
+buttercups, knee-deep, white American daisies, and red clover, and among
+the sheep we had our choice of shorn and unshorn; they were equally
+abundant. Some of the blossomy May was left yet on the hawthorns, and
+over all the sky hovered, with pale-white clouds in pale-blue spaces
+of air like an inverted lake of bonnyclabber. We stopped the night at
+Chester, and the next evening, in the full daylight of 7.40, we pushed
+on to Liverpool, over lovely levels, with a ground swell like that of
+Kansas plains, under a sunset drying its tears and at last radiantly
+smiling.
+
+
+II
+
+The hotel in Liverpool swarmed and buzzed with busy and murmurous
+American arrivals. One could hardly get at the office window, on account
+of them, to plead for a room. A dense group of our countrywomen were
+buying picture-postals of the rather suave office-ladies, and helplessly
+fawning on them in the inept confidences of American women with all
+persons in official or servile attendance. "Let me stay here," one of
+them entreated, "because there's such a draught at the other window.
+May I?" She was a gentle child of forty-five or fifty; and I do not know
+whether she was allowed to stay in the sheltered nook or not, tender
+creature. As she was in every one else's way there, possibly she was
+harshly driven into the flaw at the other window.
+
+[Illustration: ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LIVERPOOL]
+
+The place was a little America which swelled into a larger with the
+arrivals of the successive steamers, though the soft swift English
+trains bore our co-nationals away as rapidly as they could. Many
+familiar accents remained till the morning, and the breakfast-room was
+full of a nasal resonance which would have made one at home anywhere in
+our East or West. I, who was then vainly trying to be English, escaped
+to the congenial top of the farthest bound tram, and flew, at the rate
+of four miles an hour, to the uttermost suburbs of Liverpool, whither
+no rumor of my native speech could penetrate. It was some balm to my
+wounded pride of country to note how pale and small the average type of
+the local people was. The poorer classes swarmed along a great part
+of the tram-line in side streets of a hard, stony look, and what
+characterized itself to me as a sort of iron squalor seemed to prevail.
+You cannot anywhere have great prosperity without great adversity, just
+as you cannot have day without night, and the more Liverpool evidently
+flourished the more it plainly languished. I found no pleasure in the
+paradox, and I was not overjoyed by the inevitable ugliness of the brick
+villas of the suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed. But
+then, after divers tram changes, came the consolation of beautiful
+riverside beaches, thronged with people who looked gay at that distance,
+and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills, blue, blue.
+
+
+III
+
+At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we
+rejected a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought it too
+thatched and too cottage to be quite true (though I do not now say that
+there were vermin in the straw roof), and accepted the hospitality of
+a pastry-cook's shop. We felt the more at home with the kind woman
+who kept it because she had a brother at Chicago in the employ of the
+Pinkerton Detective Agency, and had once been in Stratford-on-Avon; this
+doubly satisfied us as cultivated Americans. She had a Welsh name, and
+she testified to a great prevalence of Welsh and Irish in the population
+of Liverpool; besides, she sent us to a church of the Crusaders at
+Little Crosby, and it was no fault of hers that we did not find it. We
+found one of the many old crosses for which Little Crosby is named, and
+this was quite as much as we merited. It stood at the intersection of
+the streets in what seemed the fragment of a village, not yet lost in
+the vast maw of the city, and it calmed all the simple neighborhood,
+so that we sat down at its foot and rested a long, long minute till the
+tram came by and took us back into the loud, hard heart of Liverpool.
+
+I do not mean to blame it, for it was no louder or harder than the
+hearts of other big towns, and it had some alleviation from the many
+young couples who were out together half-holidaying in the unusually
+pleasant Saturday weather. I wish their complexions had been better,
+but you cannot have South-of-England color if you live as far north as
+Liverpool, and all the world knows what the American color is. The young
+couples abounded in the Gallery of Fine Arts, where they frankly looked
+at one another instead of the pictures. The pictures might have been
+better, but then they might have been worse (there being examples of
+Filippo Lippi, Memmi, Holbein, and, above all, the _Dante's Dream_ of
+Rossetti); and in any case those couples could come and see them when
+they were old men and women; but now they had one another in a moment of
+half-holiday which could not last forever.
+
+In the evening there were not so many lovers at the religious meetings
+before the classic edifice opposite the hotel, where the devotions were
+transacted with the help of a brass-band; but there were many youths
+smoking short pipes, and flitting from one preacher to another, in the
+half-dozen groups. Some preachers were nonconformist, but there was one
+perspiring Anglican priest who labored earnestly with his hearers, and
+who had more of his aspirates in the right place. Many of his hearers
+were in the rags which seem a favorite wear in Liverpool, and I hope his
+words did their poor hearts good.
+
+Slightly apart from the several congregations, I found myself with a
+fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me in an accent
+so unlike my own American that I ventured to answer him in Italian. He
+was indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos Ayres and was
+presently thinking of New York; and we had some friendly discourse
+together concerning the English. His ideas of them were often so
+parallel with my own that I hardly know how to say he thought them
+an improvident people. I owned that they spent much more on state, or
+station, than the Americans; but we neither had any censure for them
+otherwise. He was of that philosophic mind which one is rather apt to
+encounter in the Latin races, and I could well wish for his further
+acquaintance. His talk rapt me to far other and earlier scenes, and I
+seemed to be conversing with him under a Venetian heaven, among objects
+of art more convincing than the equestrian statue of the late Queen, who
+had no special motive I could think of for being shown to her rightly
+loving subjects on horseback. We parted with the expressed hope of
+seeing each other again, and if this should meet his eye and he can
+recall the pale young man, with the dark full beard, who chatted with
+him between the pillars of the Piazzetta, forty years before our actual
+encounter I would be glad of his address.
+
+
+IV
+
+How strange are the uses of travel! There was a time when the mention
+of Liverpool would have conjured up for me nothing but the thought of
+Hawthorne, who spent divers dull consular years there, and has left a
+record of them which I had read, with the wish that it were cheerfuler.
+Yet, now, here on the ground his feet might have trod, and in the very
+smoke he breathed, I did not once think of him. I thought as little of
+that poor Felicia Hemans, whose poetry filled my school-reading years
+with the roar of the wintry sea breaking from the waveless Plymouth Bay
+on the stern and rock-bound coast where the Pilgrim Fathers landed on a
+bowlder measuring eight by ten feet, now fenced in against the predatory
+hammers and chisels of reverent visitors. I knew that Gladstone was born
+at Liverpool, but not Mrs. Oliphant, and the only literary shade I could
+summon from a past vague enough to my ignorance was William Roscoe,
+whose _Life of Leo X._, in the Bohn Library, had been too much for my
+young zeal when my zeal was still young. My other memories of Liverpool
+have been acquired since my visit, and I now recur fondly to the
+picturesque times when King John founded a castle there, to the prouder
+times when Sir Francis Bacon represented it in Parliament; or again to
+the brave days when it resisted Prince Rupert for three weeks, and the
+inglorious epoch when the new city (it was then only some four or five
+hundred years old) began to flourish on the trade in slaves with the
+colonies of the Spanish Main, and on the conjoint and congenial traffic
+in rum, sugar, and tobacco.
+
+[Illustration: THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL]
+
+It will be suspected from these reminiscences that I have been studying
+a page of fine print in Baedeker, and I will not deceive the reader. It
+is true; but it is also true that I had some wonder, altogether my own,
+that so great a city should make so small an appeal to the imagination.
+In this it outdoes almost any metropolis of our own. Even in journalism,
+an intensely modern product, it does not excel; Manchester has its able
+and well-written _Guardian_, but what has Liverpool? Glasgow has its
+Glasgow School of Painting, but again what has Liverpool? It is said
+that not above a million of its people live in it; all the rest, who
+can, escape to Chester, where they perhaps vainly hope to escape the
+Americans. There, intrenched in charming villas behind myrtle hedges,
+they measurably do so; but Americans are very penetrating, and I would
+not be sure that the thickest and highest hedge was invulnerable to
+them. As it is, they probably constitute the best society of Liverpool,
+which the natives have abandoned to them, though they do not constitute
+it permanently, but consecutively. Every Cunarder, every White Star,
+pours out upon a city abandoned by its own good society a flood of
+cultivated Americans, who eddy into its hotels, and then rush out
+of them by every train within twenty-four hours, and often within
+twenty-five minutes. They understand that there are no objects of
+interest in Liverpool; and they are not met at the Customs with
+invitations to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner from the people of rank
+and fashion with whom they have come to associate. These have their
+stately seats in the lovely neighboring country, but they are not at the
+landing-stage, and even the uncultivated American cannot stay for the
+vast bourgeoisie of which Liverpool, like the cities of his own land,
+is composed. Our own cities have a social consciousness, and are each
+sensible of being a centre, with a metropolitan destiny; but the strange
+thing about Liverpool and the like English towns is that they are
+without any social consciousness. Their meek millions are socially
+unborn; they can come into the world only in London, and in their
+prenatal obscurity they remain folded in a dreamless silence, while all
+the commercial and industrial energies rage round them in a gigantic
+maturity.
+
+
+V
+
+The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of entry
+for our human cargoes, indentured apprentices of the beautiful, the
+historical. With the almost immediate transference of the original
+transatlantic steamship interests from Bristol, Liverpool became the
+only place where you could arrive. American lines, long erased from the
+seas, and the Inman line, the Cunard line, the White Star line, and the
+rest, would land you nowhere else. Then heretical steamers began to land
+you at Glasgow; worse schismatics carried you to Southampton; there
+were heterodox craft that touched at Plymouth, and now great swelling
+agnostics bring you to London itself. Still, Liverpool remains the
+greatest port of entry for our probationers, who are bound out to the
+hotels and railroad companies of all Europe till they have morally paid
+back their fare. The superstition that if you go in a Cunarder you can
+sleep on both ears is no longer so exclusive as it once was; yet the
+Cunarder continues an ark of safety for the timid and despairing,
+and the cooking is so much better than it used to be that if in
+contravention of the old Cunard rule against a passenger's being carried
+overboard you do go down, you may be reasonably sure of having eaten
+something that the wallowing sea-monsters will like in you.
+
+[Illustration: THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS]
+
+I have tried to give some notion of the fond behavior of the arriving
+Americans in the hotels; no art can give the impression of their
+exceeding multitude. Expresses, panting with as much impatience as the
+disciplined English expresses ever suffer themselves to show, await them
+in the stations, which are effectively parts of the great hotels, and
+whir away to London with them as soon as they can drive up from the
+steamer; but many remain to rest, to get the sea out of their heads
+and legs, and to prepare their spirits for adjustment to the novel
+conditions. These the successive trains carry into the heart of the land
+everywhere, these and their baggage, to which they continue attached by
+their very heart-strings, invisibly stretching from their first-class
+corridor compartments to the different luggage-vans. I must say they
+have very tenderly, very perfectly imagined us, all those hotel people
+and railroad folk, and fold us, anxious and bewildered exiles, in a
+reassuring and consoling embrace which leaves all their hands--they are
+Briarean--free for the acceptance of our wide, wild tips. You may trust
+yourself implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not
+trust the head porter who tells you to take the London and Northwestern,
+for then you will have to change four times on the way and at every
+junction personally see that your baggage is unladen and started anew to
+its destination.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER
+
+
+I will suppose the reader not to be going to Oxford, but, in compliance
+with the scheme of this paper, to Manchester, where there is perhaps
+no other reason for his going. He will there, for one thing, find the
+supreme type of the railroad hotel which in England so promptly shelters
+and so kindly soothes the fluttered exile. At Manchester, even more than
+at Liverpool, we are imagined in the immense railroad station hotel,
+which is indeed perhaps superorganized and over-convenienced after an
+American ideal: one does not, for instance, desire a striking, or even
+a ticking, clock in the transom above one's bedroom door; but the like
+type of hotel is to be found at every great railroad centre or terminal
+in England, and it is never to be found quite bad, though of course it
+is sometimes better and sometimes worse. It is hard to know if it is
+more hotel or more station; perhaps it is a mixture of each which defies
+analysis; but in its well-studied composition you pass, as it were, from
+your car to your room, as from one chamber to another. This is putting
+the fact poetically; but, prosaically, the intervening steps are few at
+the most; and when you have entered your room your train has ceased to
+be. The simple miracle would be impossible in America, where our trains,
+when not shrieking at the tops of their whistles, are backing and
+filling with a wild clangor of their bells, and making a bedlam of their
+stations; but in England they
+
+     "Come like shadows, so depart,"
+
+and make no sound within the vast caravansary where the enchanted
+traveller has changed from them into a world of dreams.
+
+
+I
+
+These hotels are, next to the cathedrals, perhaps the greatest wonder
+of England, and in Manchester the railway hotel is in some ways more
+wonderful than the cathedral, which is not so much planned on our native
+methods. Yet this has the merit, if it is a merit, of antedating our
+Discovery by nearly a century, and pre-historically it is indefinitely
+older. My sole recorded impression of it is that I found it smelling
+strongly of coal-gas, such as comes up the register when your furnace is
+mismanaged; but that is not strange in such a manufacturing centre; and
+it would be paltering with the truth not to own a general sense of the
+beauty and grandeur in it which no English cathedral is without. The
+morning was fitly dim and chill, and one could move about in the vague
+all the more comfortably for the absence of that appeal of thronging
+monuments which harasses and bewilders the visitor in other cathedrals;
+one could really give one's self up to serious emotion, and not be
+sordidly and rapaciously concerned with objects of interest. Manchester
+has been an episcopal see only some fifty years; before that the
+cathedral was simply T' Owd Church, and in this character it is still
+venerable, and is none the less so because of the statue of Oliver
+Cromwell which holds the chief place in the open square before it. Call
+it an incongruity, if you will, but that enemy of episcopacy is at least
+not accused of stabling his horses in The Old Church at Manchester, or
+despoiling it of its sacred images and stained glass, and he merits a
+monument there if anywhere.
+
+[Illustration: MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL]
+
+With the constantly passing trams which traverse the square, he is
+undoubtedly more significant of modern Manchester than the episcopacy
+is, and perhaps of that older Manchester which held for him against the
+king, and that yet older Manchester of John Bradford, the first martyr
+of the Reformation to suffer death at the stake in Smithfield. Of the
+still yet older, far older Manchester, which trafficked with the Greeks
+of Marseilles, and later passed under the yoke of Agricola and was
+a Roman military station, and got the name of Maen-ceaster from the
+Saxons, and was duly bedevilled by the Danes and mishandled by the
+Normans, there may be traces in the temperament of the modern town
+which would escape even the scrutiny of the hurried American. Such
+a compatriot was indeed much more bent upon getting a pair of cotton
+socks, like those his own continent wears almost universally in summer,
+but a series of exhaustive visits to all the leading haberdashers in
+Manchester developed the strange fact that there, in the world-heart of
+the cotton-spinning industry, there was no such thing to be found.
+In Manchester there are only woollen socks, heavier or lighter, to be
+bought, and the shopmen smile pityingly if you say, in your strange
+madness, that woollen socks are not for summer wear. Possibly, however,
+it was not summer in Manchester, and we were misled by the almanac.
+Possibly we had been spoiled by three weeks of warm, sunny rain on the
+Welsh coast, and imagined a vain thing in supposing that the end of
+August was not the beginning of November.
+
+
+II
+
+I thought Manchester, however, as it shows itself in its public
+edifices, a most dignified town, with as great beauty as could be
+expected of a place which has always had so much to do besides looking
+after its figure and complexion. The very charming series or system
+of parks, public gardens, and playgrounds, unusual in their number and
+variety, had a sympathetic allure in the gray, cool light, even to the
+spectator passing in a hurried hansom. They have not the unity of
+the Boston or Chicago parkways, and I will own that I had not come to
+Manchester for them. What interested me more were the miles and miles
+of comfortable-looking little brick houses in which, for all I knew, the
+mill-labor dwelt. Very possibly it did not; the mills themselves are
+now nearly all, or mostly, outside of Manchester, and perhaps for this
+reason I did not find the slums, when shown them, very slummy, and I
+saw no such dreadful shapes of rags and dirt as in Liverpool. We passed
+through a quarter of large, old-fashioned mansions, as charming as
+they were unimagined of Manchester; but these could not have been the
+dwellings of the mill-hands, any more than of the mill-owners. The
+mill-owners, at least, live in suburban palaces and villas, which I
+fancy by this time are not
+
+     --"pricking a cockney ear,"
+
+as in the time of Tennyson's "Maud."
+
+What wild and whirling insolences, however, the people who have greatly
+made the greatness of England have in all times suffered from their
+poets and novelists, with few exceptions! One need not be a very blind
+devotee of commercialism or industrialism to resent the affronts put
+upon them, when one comes to the scenes of such mighty achievement as
+Liverpool, and Manchester, and Sheffield; but how mildly they seem to
+have taken it all--with what a meek subordination and sufferance! One
+asks one's self whether the society of such places can be much inferior
+to that of Pittsburg, or Chicago, or St. Louis, which, even from the
+literary attics of New York, we should not exactly allow ourselves to
+spit upon. Practically, I know nothing about society in Manchester, or
+rather, out of it; and I can only say of the general type, of richer or
+poorer, as I saw it in the streets, that it was uncommonly good. Not so
+many women as men were abroad in such weather as we had, and I cannot be
+sure that the sex shows there that superiority physically which it has
+long held morally with us. One learns in the north not to look for the
+beautiful color of the south and west; but in Manchester the average
+faces were intelligent and the figures good.
+
+
+III
+
+With such a journal as the Manchester _Guardian_ still keeping its
+high rank among English newspapers, there cannot be question of the
+journalistic sort of thinking in the place. Of the sort that comes to
+its effect in literature, such as, say, Mrs. Gaskell's novels, there may
+also still be as much as ever; and I will not hazard my safe ignorance
+in a perilous conjecture. I can only say that of the Unitarianism
+which eventuated in that literature, I heard it had largely turned to
+episcopacy, as Unitarianism has in our own Boston. I must not forget
+that one of our religions, now a dying faith, was invented in Manchester
+by Ann Lee, who brought, through the usual persecutions, Shakerism to
+such spiritual importance as it has now lost in these States. Only those
+who have known the Shakers, with their good lives and gentle ways,
+can regret with me the decline of the celibate communism which their
+foundress imagined in her marital relations with the Lancashire
+blacksmith she left behind her.
+
+I am reminded (or perhaps instructed) by Mr. Hope Moncrieff in Black's
+excellent _Guide to Manchester_ that before Mrs. Gaskell's celebrity the
+fitful fame of De Quincey shed a backward gleam upon his native place,
+which can still show the house where he was probably born and the
+grammar-school he certainly ran away from. In my forgetfulness, or my
+ignorance, that Manchester was the mother of this tricksy master-spirit
+of English prose, who was an idol of my youth, I failed to visit either
+house. The renown of Cobden and of Bright is precious to a larger world
+than mine; and the name of the stalwart Quaker friend of man is dear
+to every American who remembers the heroic part he played in our behalf
+during our war for the Union. It is one of the amusing anomalies of
+the British constitution, that the great city from whose political
+fame these names are inseparable should have had no representation in
+Parliament from Cromwell's time to Victoria's. Fancy Akron, Ohio, or
+Grand Rapids, Michigan, without a member of Congress!
+
+[Illustration: TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER]
+
+The "Manchester school" of political economy has long since passed
+into reproach if not obloquy with people for whom a byword is a potent
+weapon, and perhaps the easiest they can handle, and I am not myself
+so extreme a _laissez-faireist_ as to have thought of that school with
+pathos in the city of its origin; but I dare say it was a good thing
+in its time. We are only now slowly learning how to apply the opposite
+social principles in behalf of the Man rather than the Master, and
+we have not yet surmounted all the difficulties or dangers of the
+experiment. It is droll how, in a tolerably well-meaning world like
+this, any sort of contempt becomes inclusive, and a whole population
+suffers for the vice, or it may be the virtue, of a very small majority,
+or a very powerful minority. Probably the most liberal and intelligent
+populations of Great Britain are those of Manchester and Birmingham,
+names which have stood for a hard and sordid industrialism, unrelieved
+by noble sympathies and impulses. It is quite possible that a less
+generous spirit than mine would have censured the "Manchester school"
+for the weather of the place, and found in its cold gray light the
+effect of the Gradgrind philosophy which once wrapt a world of fiction
+in gloom.
+
+
+IV
+
+I can only be sure that the light, what little there was of it, was very
+cold and gray, but it quite sufficed to show the huge lowries, as the
+wagons are called, passing through the streets with the cotton fabrics
+of the place in certain stages of manufacture: perhaps the raw, perhaps
+the finished material. In Manchester itself one sees not much else of
+"the cotton-spinning chorus" which has sent its name so far. The cotton
+is now spun in ten or twenty towns in the nearer or farther neighborhood
+of the great city, as every one but myself and some ninety millions of
+other Americans well know. I had seen something of cotton-mills in our
+Lowell, and I was eager, if not willing, to contrast them with the mills
+of Manchester; but such of these as still remained there were, for my
+luckless moment, inoperative. Personal influences brought me within one
+or two days of their starting up; one almost started up during my brief
+stay; but a great mill, employing perhaps a thousand hands, cannot start
+up for the sake of the impression desired by the aesthetic visitor, and
+I had to come away without mine.
+
+I had to come away without that personal acquaintance with the great
+Manchester ship-canal which I almost equally desired. Coming or going, I
+asked about it, and was told, looking for it from the car window, there,
+_there_ it was! but beyond a glimpse of something very long and very
+straight marking the landscape with lines no more convincing than those
+which science was once decided, and then undecided, to call canals on
+the planet Mars, I had no sight of it. I do not say this was not
+my fault; and I will not pretend that the canal, like the mills of
+Manchester, was not running. I dare say I was not in the right hands,
+but this was not for want of trying to get into them. In the local
+delusion that it was then summer, those whose kindness might have
+befriended the ignorance of the stranger were "away on their holidays":
+that was exactly the phrase.
+
+When, by a smiling chance, I fell into the right hands and was borne
+to the Cotton Exchange I did not fail of a due sense of the important
+scene, I hope. The building itself, like the other public buildings of
+Manchester, is most dignified, and the great hall of the exchange is
+very noble. I would not, if I could, have repressed a thrill of pride
+in seeing our national colors and emblems equalled with those of Great
+Britain at one end of the room, but these were the only things American
+in the impression left. We made our way through the momently thickening
+groups on the floor, and in the guidance of a member of the exchange
+found a favorable point of observation in the gallery. From this the
+vast space below showed first a moving surface of hats, with few silk
+toppers among them, but a multitude of panamas and other straws. The
+marketing was not carried on with anything like the wild, rangy movement
+of our Stock Exchange, and the floor sent up no such hell-roaring (there
+is no other phrase for it) tumult as rises from the mad but not malign
+demons of that most dramatic representation of perdition. The merchants,
+alike staid, whether old or young, congregated in groups which, dealing
+in a common type of goods, kept the same places till, toward three
+o'clock, they were lost in the mass which covered the floor. Even
+then there was no uproar, no rush or push, no sharp cries or frenzied
+shouting; but from the crowd, which was largely made up of elderly men,
+there rose a sort of surd, rich hum, deepening ever, and never breaking
+into a shriek of torment or derision. It was not histrionic, and yet for
+its commercial importance it was one of the most moving spectacles which
+could offer itself to the eye in the whole world.
+
+[Illustration: THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL]
+
+I cannot pretend to have profited by my visit to that immensely valuable
+deposit of books, bought from the Spencer family at Althorp, and
+dedicated as the Rylands library to the memory of a citizen of
+Manchester. Books in a library, except you have time and free access to
+them, are as baffling as so many bottles in a wine-cellar, which are
+not opened for you, and which if they were would equally go to your head
+without final advantage. I find, therefore, that my sole note upon
+the Rylands Library is the very honest one that it smelt, like the
+cathedral, of coal-gas. The absence of this gas was the least merit
+of the beautiful old Chetham College, with its library dating from the
+seventeenth century, and claiming to have been the first free library in
+England, and doubtless the world. In the cloistered picturesqueness
+of the place, its mediaeval memorials, and its ancient peace, I found
+myself again in those dear Middle Ages which are nowhere quite wanting
+in England, and against which I rubbed off all smirch of the modernity I
+had come to Manchester for.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD
+
+
+If I had waited a little till I had got into the beautiful Derbyshire
+country which lies, or rather rolls, between Manchester and Sheffield,
+I could as easily have got rid of my epoch in the smiling agricultural
+landscape. I do not know just the measure of the Black Country in
+England, or where Sheffield begins to be perhaps the blackest spot in
+it; but I am sure that nothing not surgically clean could be whiter than
+the roads that, almost as soon as we were free of Manchester, began to
+climb the green, thickly wooded hills, and dip into the grassy and leafy
+valleys. In the very heart of the loveliness we found Sheffield most
+nobly posed against a lurid sunset, and clouding the sky, which can
+never be certain of being blue, with the smoke of a thousand towering
+chimneys. From whatever point you have it, the sight is most prodigious,
+but no doubt the subjective sense of the great ducal mansions and
+estates which neighbor the mirky metropolis of steel and iron has its
+part in heightening the dramatic effect.
+
+
+I
+
+The English, with their love of brevity and simplicity, call these proud
+seats the Dukeries, but our affair was not with them, and I shall not
+be able to follow the footmen or butlers or housekeepers who would
+so obligingly show them to the reader in my company. I had a fine
+consciousness of passing some of them on my way into the town, and when
+there of being, however, incongruously, in the midst of them.
+Worksop, more properly than Sheffield, is the plebeian heart of these
+aristocratic homes, or sojourns, which no better advised traveller,
+or less hurried, will fail to see. But I was in Sheffield to see the
+capital of the Black Country in its most characteristic aspects, and I
+thought it felicitously in keeping, after I had dined (less well than I
+could have wished, at the railway hotel which scarcely kept the promise
+made for it by other like hotels) that I should be tempted beyond my
+strength to go and see that colored opera which we had lately sent,
+after its signal success with us, to an even greater prosperity in
+England. _In Dahomey_ is a musical drama not pitched in the highest key,
+but it is a genuine product of our national life, and to witness its
+performance by the colored brethren who invented it, and were giving
+it with great applause in an atmosphere quite undarkened by our racial
+prejudices, was an experience which I would not have missed for many
+Dukeries. The kindly house was not so suffocatingly full that it could
+not find breath for cheers and laughter; but I proudly felt that no
+one there could delight so intelligently as the sole American, in the
+familiar Bowery figures, the blue policemen, the varying darky types,
+which peopled a scene largely laid in Africa. The local New York
+suggestions were often from Mr. Edward Harrigan, and all the more
+genuine for that, but there was a final cake-walk which owed its
+inspiration wholly to the genius of a race destined to greater triumphs
+in music and art, and perhaps to a kindlier civilization than our ideals
+have evolved in yet. It was pleasant to look upon those different shades
+of color, from dead black to creamy blond, in their novel relief against
+an air of ungrudging, of even respectful, appreciation, and I dare say
+the poor things liked it for themselves as much as I liked it for them.
+At a fine moment of the affair I was aware of a figure in evening dress,
+standing near me, and regarding the stage with critical severity:
+a young man, but shrewd and well in hand, who, as the unmistakable
+manager, was, I hope, finally as well satisfied as the other spectators.
+
+
+II
+
+I myself came away entirely satisfied, indeed, but for the lasting pang
+I inflicted upon myself by denying a penny to the ragged wretch who
+superfluously opened the valves of my hansom for me. My explanation to
+my soul was that I had no penny in my pocket, and that it would have
+been folly little short of crime to give so needy a wretch sixpence. But
+would it? Would it have corrupted him, since pauperize him further it
+could not? I advise the reader who finds himself in the like case to
+give the sixpence, and if he cares for the peace of my conscience, to
+make it a shilling; or, come! a half-crown, if he wishes to be truly
+handsome. It is astonishing how these regrets persist; but perhaps in
+this instance I owe the permanence of my pang to those frequent appeals
+to one's pity which repeated themselves in Sheffield. As I had noted at
+Liverpool I now noted at Sheffield that you cannot have great prosperity
+without having adversity, just as you cannot have heat without cold or
+day without dark. The one substantiates and verifies the other; and I
+perceived that wherever business throve it seemed to be at the cost of
+somebody; though even when business pines it is apparently no better.
+The thing ought to be looked into.
+
+At the moment of my visit to Sheffield, it happened that many works were
+running half-time or no time, and many people were out of work. At one
+place there was a little oblong building between branching streets,
+round which sat a miserable company of Murchers, as I heard them called,
+on long benches under the overhanging roof, who were too obviously, who
+were almost offensively, out of work. Some were old and some young, some
+dull and some fierce, some savage and some imbecile in their looks, and
+they were all stained and greasy and dirty, and looked their apathy or
+their grim despair. Even the men who were coming to or from their work
+at dinner-time looked stunted and lean and pale, with no color of that
+south of England bloom with which they might have favored a stranger.
+Slatternly girls and women abounded, and little babies carried about by
+a little larger babies, and of course kissed on their successive layers
+of dirt. There were also many small boys who, I hope, were not so wicked
+as they were ragged. At noon-time they hung much about the windows of
+cookshops which one would think their sharp hunger would have pierced
+to the steaming and smoking dishes within. The very morning after I had
+denied that man a penny at the theatre door, and was still smarting to
+think I had not given him sixpence, I saw a boy of ten, in the cut-down
+tatters of a man, gloating upon a meat-pie which a cook had cruelly set
+behind the pane in front of him. I took out the sixpence which I ought
+to have given that poor man, and made it a shilling, and put it into
+the boy's wonderfully dirty palm, and bade him go in and get the pie. He
+looked at me, and he looked at the shilling, and then I suppose he did
+as he was bid. But I ought to say, in justice to myself, that I never
+did anything of the kind again as long as I remained in Sheffield. I
+felt that I owed a duty to the place and must not go about corrupting
+the populace for my selfish pleasure.
+
+
+III
+
+Between our hotel and the main part of the town there yawned a black
+valley, rather nobly bridged, or viaducted, and beyond it in every
+direction the chimneys of the many works thickened in the perspectives.
+It was really like a dead forest, or like thick-set masts of shipping
+in a thronged port; or the vents of tellurian fires, which send up
+their flames by night and their smoke by day. It was splendid, it was
+magnificent, it was insurpassably picturesque. People must have painted
+it often, but if some bravest artist-soul would come, reverently, not
+patronizingly, and portray the sight in its naked ugliness, he would
+create one of the most beautiful masterpieces in the world. On our first
+morning the sun, when it climbed to the upper heavens, found a little
+hole in the dun pall, and shone down through it, and tried to pierce
+through the more immediate cloud above the works; but it could not, and
+it ended by shutting the hole under it, and disappearing.
+
+Beyond the foul avenues thridding the region of the works, and smelling
+of the decay of market-houses, were fine streets of shops and churches,
+and I dare say comely dwellings, with tram-cars ascending and descending
+their hilly slopes. The stores I find noted as splendid, and in my
+pocket-book I say that outside of the market-house, before you got to
+those streets, there are doves and guinea-pigs as well as a raven for
+sale in cages; and the usual horrible English display of flesh meats.
+The trams were one story, like our trolleys, without roof-seats, and
+there were plenty of them; but nothing could keep me, I suppose, till
+I had seen one of the works. Each of these stands in a vast yard, or
+close, by itself, with many buildings, and they are of all sorts; but
+I chose what I thought the most typical, and overcame the reluctance
+of the manager to let me see it. He said I had no idea what tricks were
+played by other makers to find out any new processes and steal them; but
+this was after I had pleaded my innocent trade of novelist, and assured
+him of my congenital incapability of understanding, much less conveying
+from the premises, the image of the simplest and oldest process. Then he
+gave me for guide an intelligent man who was a penknife-maker by trade,
+but was presently out of work, and glad to earn my fee.
+
+My guide proved a most decent, patient, and kindly person, and I hope
+it is no betrayal of confidence to say that he told me the men in
+these multitudinous shops work by the piece. The grinders furnish their
+grindstones and all their tools for making the knives; there is no dry
+grinding, such as used to fill the lungs of the grinders with deadly
+particles of steel and stone, and bring them to an early death; but
+sometimes a stone, which ordinarily lasts six months, will burst and
+drive the grinder through the roof. The blade-makers do their own
+forging and hammering, and it is from first to last apparently all
+hand-work. But it is head-work and heart-work too, and the men who
+wrought at it wrought with such intensity and constancy that they did
+not once look up or round where we paused to look on. I was made to know
+that trade was dull and work slack, and these fellows were lucky fellows
+to have anything to do. Still I did not envy them; and I felt it a
+distinct relief to pass from their shops into the cool, dim crypt which
+was filled with tusks of ivory, in all sizes from those of the
+largest father elephant to those of the babes of the herd; these were
+milk-tusks, I suppose. They get dearer as the elephants get scarcer; and
+that must have been why I paid as much for a penknife in the glittering
+showroom as it would have cost me in New York, with the passage money
+and the duties added. Because of the price, perhaps, I did not think of
+buying the two-thousand-bladed penknife I saw there; but I could never
+have used all the blades, now that we no longer make quill pens. I
+looked fondly at the maker's name on the knife I did buy, and said that
+the table cutlery of a certain small household which set itself up forty
+years ago had borne the same: but the pleasant salesman did not seem to
+feel the pathos of the fact so much as I.
+
+
+IV
+
+There is not only a vast deal of industry in Sheffield, but there is
+an unusual abundance of history, as there might very well be in a place
+that began life, in the usual English fashion, under the Britons and
+grew into municipal consciousness in the fostering care of the Romans
+and the ruder nurture of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Lords it had of
+the last, and the great line of the Earls of Shrewsbury presently rose
+and led Sheffield men back to battle in France, where the first earl
+fell on the bloody field, and so many of the men died with him in 1453
+that there was not a house in all the region which did not mourn a loss.
+Which of the Roses Sheffield held for, White or Red, I am not sure;
+but we will say that it duly suffered for one or the other; and it is
+certain that the great Cardinal Wolsey rested eighteen days at Sheffield
+Manor just before he went to die at Leicester; and Mary Queen of Scots
+spent fourteen years of sorrowful captivity, sometimes at the Manor
+and sometimes in Sheffield Castle. This hold was taken by the
+Parliamentarians in the Civil War; but the famous industries of the
+place had begun long before; so that Chaucer could say of one of his
+pilgrims,
+
+     "A Sheffield thwytel bare he in his hose."
+
+Thwytels, or whittles, figured in the broils and stage-plays of
+Elizabethan times, and three gross of them were exported from Liverpool
+in 1589, when the Sheffield penknife was already famed the best in the
+world. Manufactures flourished there apace when England turned to them
+from agriculture, and Sheffield is now a city of four hundred thousand
+or more. Apparently it has been growing radical, as the centres of
+prosperity and adversity always do, and the days of the Chartist
+agitation continued there for ten years, from 1839 till it came as near
+open rebellion as it well could in a plot for an armed uprising. Then
+that cause of the people, like many another, failed, and liberty there,
+as elsewhere in England, was fain to
+
+        "broaden slowly down
+     From precedent to precedent."
+
+Labor troubles, patient or violent, have followed, as labor troubles
+must, but leisure has always been equal to their pacification, and now
+Sheffield takes its adversity almost as quietly as its prosperity.
+
+[Illustration: TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD]
+
+
+V
+
+We were not there, though, for others' labor or leisure, which we have
+plenty of at home; but even before I appeased such conscience as I had
+about seeing a type of the works, we went a long drive up out of the
+town to that Manor where the poor, brilliant, baddish Scotch queen was
+imprisoned by her brilliant, baddish English cousin. In any question
+of goodness, there was little to choose between them; both were
+blood-stained liars; but it is difficult being a good woman and a queen
+too, and they only failed where few have triumphed. Mary is the more
+appealing to the fancy because she suffered beyond her deserts,
+but Elizabeth was to be pitied because Mary had made it politically
+imperative for her to kill her. All this we had threshed out many times
+before, and had said that, cat for cat, Mary was the more dangerous
+because she was the more feminine, and Elizabeth the more detestable
+because she was the more masculine in her ferocity. We were therefore
+in the right mood to visit Mary's prison, and we were both indignant and
+dismayed to find that our driver, called from a mews at a special price
+set upon his intelligence, had never heard of it and did not know where
+it was.
+
+We reported his inability to the head porter, who came out of the hotel
+in a fine flare of sarcasm. "You call yourself a Sheffield man and not
+know where the Old Manor is!" he began, and presently reduced that proud
+ignoramus of a driver to such a willingness to learn that we thought it
+at least safe to set out with him, and so started for the long climb
+up the hills that hold Sheffield in their hollow. When we reached their
+crest, we looked down and back through the clearer air upon as strange
+and grand a sight as could be. It was as if we were looking into the
+crater of a volcano, which was sending up its smoke through a thousand
+vents. All detail of the works and their chimneys was lost in the
+retrospect; one was aware only of a sort of sea of vapor through which
+they loomed and gloomed.
+
+Our ascent was mostly through winding and climbing streets of
+little dirty houses, with frowsy gardens beside them, and the very
+dirtiest-faced children in England playing about them. From time to time
+our driver had to ask his way of the friendly flat-bosomed slatterns,
+with babies in their arms, on their thresholds, or the women tending
+shop, or peddling provisions, who were all kind to him, and assured him
+with varying degrees of confidence that the Old Manor was a bit, or a
+goodish bit, beyond. All at once we came upon the sight of it on an open
+top, hard by what is left of the ruins of the real Manor, where Wolsey
+stayed that little while from death. The relics are broken walls, higher
+here, lower there; with some Tudor fireplaces showing through their
+hollow windows. What we saw in tolerable repair was the tower of the
+Manor, or the lodge, and we drove to it across a field, on a track made
+by farm carts, and presently kept by a dog that showed his teeth in a
+grin not wholly of amusement at our temerity. While we debated whether
+we had not better let the driver get down and knock, a farmer-like man
+came to the door and called the dog off. Then, in a rich North Country
+accent, he welcomed us to his kitchen parlor, where his wife was peeling
+potatoes for their midday dinner, and so led us up the narrow stone
+stairs of the tower to the chambers where Mary miserably passed those
+many long years of captivity.
+
+The rooms were visibly restored in every point where they could have
+needed restoration, but they were not ruthlessly or too insistently
+restored. There was even an antique chair, but when our guide was put on
+his honor as to whether it was one of the original chairs he answered,
+"Well, if people wanted a chair!" He was a rather charmingly quaint,
+humorous person, with that queer conscience, and he did not pretend to
+be moved by the hard inexorable stoniness of the place which had been
+a queen's prison for many years. One must not judge it too severely,
+though: bowers and prisons of that day looked much alike, and Mary
+Stuart may have felt this a bower, and only hated it because she could
+not get out of it, or anyhow break the relentless hold of that Earl and
+Countess of Shrewsbury whose captive guest she was, though she never
+ceased trying. We went up on the wide flat roof, of lead or stone,
+whither her feet must have so often heavily climbed, and looked out over
+the lovely landscape which she must have abhorred; and the wind that
+blew over it, in late August, was very cold; far colder than the air of
+the prison, or the bower, below.
+
+The place belongs now to the Duke of Norfolk, the great Catholic duke,
+and owes its restoration to his pity and his piety. Our farmer guide
+was himself a Protestant, but he spoke well of the duke, with whom he
+reported himself in such colloquies as, "I says to Dook," and, "Dook
+says to me." When he understood that we were Americans he asked after a
+son of his who had gone out to our continent twenty years before. He had
+only heard from him once, and that on the occasion of his being robbed
+of all his money by a roommate. It was in a place called Massatusy; we
+suggested Massachusetts, and he assented that such might be the place;
+and Mary's prison-house acquired an added pathos.
+
+
+VI
+
+We drove back through the beautiful park, the Duke of Norfolk's gift to
+Sheffield, which is plentifully provided, like all English towns, with
+public pleasure-grounds. They lie rather outside of it, but within it
+are many and many religious and civic edifices which merit to be seen.
+We chose as chiefest the ancient Parish Church, of Norman origin and
+modern restoration, where we visited the tomb of the Lord and Lady
+Shrewsbury who were Mary Stuart's jailers; or if they were not, a pair
+of their family were, and it comes to the same thing, emotionally. The
+chapel in which they lie is most beautiful, and the verger had just
+brushed the carpet within the chancel to such immaculate dustlessness
+that he could not bring himself to let us walk over it. He let us walk
+round it, and we saw the chapel as a favor, which we discharged with an
+abnormal tip after severe debate whether a person of this verger's rich
+respectability and perfect manner would take any tip at all. In the
+event it appeared that he would.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+NINE DAYS' WONDER IN YORK
+
+
+Perhaps it would be better to come to York somewhat earlier in the year
+than the 2d of September. By that time the English summer has suffered
+often if not severe discouragements. It has really only two months out
+of the year to itself, and even July and August are not always constant
+to it. To be sure, their defection cannot spoil it, but they dispose it
+to the slights of September in a dejection from which there is no rise
+to those coquetries with October known to our own summer. Yet, having
+said so much, I feel bound to add that our nine days in York, from the
+2d to the 12th of September, were more summer than autumn days, some
+wholly, some partly, with hours of sunshine keeping the flowers bright
+which the rain kept fresh. If you walked fast in this sunshine you were
+quite hot, and sometimes in the rain you were uncomfortably warm, or at
+least you were wet. If the mornings demanded a fire in the grate, the
+evenings were so clement that the lamp was sufficient, and the noons
+were very well with neither.
+
+
+I
+
+The day of our arrival in York began bright at Sheffield, where there
+was a man quarrelling so loudly and aimlessly in the station that we
+were glad to get away from him, as well as from the mountains of slag
+surrounding the iron metropolis. The train ran through a pass in these,
+and then we found ourselves in a plain country, and, though the day
+turned gray and misty, there seemed a sort of stored sunshine in the
+fields of wheat which the farmers were harvesting far and near. One has
+heard so much of the decay of the English agriculture that one sees
+what is apparently the contrary with nothing less than astonishment. The
+acreage of these wheat-fields was large, and the yield heavier than I
+could remember to have seen at home. Where the crop had been got in,
+much ploughing for the next year had been done already, and where the
+ploughing was finished the work of sowing by drill was going steadily
+forward, in the faith that such an unprecedented summer as was now
+passing would return another year. At all these pleasant labors, of
+course, the rooks were helping, or at least bossing.
+
+
+II
+
+We expected to stay certainly a week, and perhaps two weeks, in York,
+and our luck with railway hotels had been so smiling elsewhere that we
+had no other mind than to spend the time at the house into which we all
+but stepped from our train. But we had reckoned without our host, as he
+was represented by one of a half-dozen alert young ladies in the office,
+who asked how long we expected to stay, and when we expressed a general
+purpose of staying indefinitely, said that all her rooms were taken
+from the next Monday by people who had engaged them long before for
+the races. I did not choose to betray my ignorance to a woman, but
+I privately asked the head porter what races those were which were
+limiting our proposed sojourn, and I am now afraid he had some
+difficulty in keeping a head porter's conventional respect for a formal
+superior in answering that we had arrived on the eve of Doncaster Week.
+Then I said, "Oh yes," and affected the knowledge of Doncaster Week
+which I resolved to acquire by staying somewhere in York till it was
+over.
+
+But as yet, that Friday afternoon, there was no hurry, and, instead of
+setting about a search for lodgings at once, we drove up into the town,
+as soon as we had tea, and visited York Minster while it was still
+the gray afternoon and not yet the gray evening. I thought the hour
+fortunate, and I do not see yet how we could have chosen a better hour
+out of the whole twenty-four, for the inside or the outside of the
+glorious fane, the grandest and beautifulest in all England, as I felt
+then and I feel now. If I were put to the question and were forced to
+say in what its supreme grandeur and beauty lay, I should perhaps say in
+its most ample simplicity. No doubt it is full of detail, but I keep no
+sense of this from that mighty interior, with its tree-like, clustered
+pillars, and its measureless windows, like breadths of stained foliage
+in autumnal woodlands. You want the scale of nature for the Minster at
+York, and I cannot liken it to less than all-out-doors. Some cathedrals,
+like that of Wells, make you think of gardens; but York Minster will not
+be satisfied with less than an autumnal woodland, where the trees stand
+in clumps, with grassy levels about them, and with spacious openings to
+the sky, that let in the colored evening light.
+
+You could not get lost in it, for it was so free of all such
+architectural undergrowth as cumbers the perspectives of some
+cathedrals; besides, the afternoon of our visit there were so many other
+Americans that you could easily have asked your way in your own dialect.
+We loitered over its lengths and breadths, and wondered at its windows,
+which were like the gates of sunrise and sunset for magnitude, and
+lingered in a sumptuous delay from going into the choir, delighting in
+the gray twilight which seemed to gather from the gray walls inward,
+when suddenly what seemed a metallic curtain was dropped with a clash
+and the simultaneous up-flashing of electric bulbs inside it, and we
+were shut out from the sight but not the sound of the service that
+began in the choir. We could not wholly regret the incident, for as
+we recalled the like operation of religion in churches of our Italian
+travel, we were reminded how equally authoritative the Church of England
+and the Church of Home were, and how little they adjust their ceremonial
+to the individual, how largely to the collective worshipper. You could
+come into the Minster of York as into the basilica of St. Mark at Venice
+for a silent prayer amid the religious influences of the place, and be
+conscious of your oneness with your Source, as if there were no
+other one; but when the priesthood called you as one of many to your
+devotions, it was with the same imperative voice in both, and you must
+obey or be cut off from your chance. I suppose it is right; but somehow
+the down-clashing of that screen of the choir in the Minster at York
+seemed to exclude us with reproach, almost with ignominy.
+
+[Illustration: YORK MINSTER--THE GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND]
+
+We did what we could to repair our wounded self respect, and did not lay
+our exclusion up against the Minster itself, which I find that I noted
+as "scatteringly noble outside." By this I dare say I meant it had not
+that artistic unity of which I brought the impression from the inside.
+They were doing, as they were always doing, every where, with English
+cathedrals, something to one of the towers; but this only enhanced
+its scattering nobleness, for it left that greatly bescaffolded tower
+largely to the imagination, in which it soared sublimer, if anything,
+than its compeer. Most of the streets leading to and from the rather
+insufficient, irregular square where the Minster stands are lanes
+of little houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth, centuries, which
+collectively curved in their line, and not only overhung at their second
+stories, but bulged outward involuntarily from the weakness of age.
+They were all quite habitable, and some much later dwellings immediately
+surrounding the church were the favorite sojourn, apparently, of such
+strangers as could have rooms at the hotels only until the Monday of
+Doncaster Week.
+
+
+III
+
+During those limited days of the week before Doncaster, I was constantly
+coming back to the Minster, which is not the germ of political York, or
+hardly religious York; the brave city was a Romano-British capital and
+a Romano-British episcopal see centuries before the first wooden temple
+was built on the site of the present edifice in 627. I should like to
+make believe that we found traces of that simple church in the crypt of
+the Minster when we went the next morning and were herded through it by
+the tenderest of vergers. Most of our flock were Americans, and we put
+our guide to such question in matters of imagination and information
+as the patience of a less amiable shepherd would not have borne. Many a
+tale, true or o'ertrue, our verger had, which he told with unction; when
+he ascended with us to the body of the church, and said that the stained
+glass of the gigantic windows suffered from the depredations of the
+mistaken birds which pecked holes in the joints of their panes, I felt
+that I had full measure from him, pressed down and running over. I do
+not remember why he said the birds should have done this, but it seems
+probable that they took the mellow colors of the glass for those of ripe
+fruits.
+
+For myself, I could not get enough of those windows, in another sort
+of famine which ought at this time to have been sated. I was forever
+wondering at their grandeur outside and their glory inside. I was glad
+to lose my way about the town, for if I kept walking I was sure, sooner
+or later, to bring up at the Minster; but the last evening of our stay
+I made a purposed pilgrimage to it for a final emotion. It was the
+clearest evening we had in York, and at half-past six the sun was
+setting in a transparent sky, which somehow it did not flush with any of
+those glaring reds which the vulgarer sorts of sunsets are fond of, but
+bathed the air in a delicate suffusion of daffodil light, just tinged
+with violet. This was the best medium to see the past of the Minster in,
+and I can see it there now, if I did not then. I followed, or I follow,
+its veracious history back to the beginning of the seventh century,
+whence you can look back further still to the earliest Christian temples
+where the Romans worshipped with the Britons, whom they had enslaved
+and converted. But it was not till 627 that the little wooden chapel was
+built on the site of the Minster, to house the rite of the Northumbrian
+King Eadwine's baptism. He felt so happy in his new faith that he
+replaced the wooden structure with stone. In the next century it was
+burned, but rebuilt by another pious prince, and probably repaired by
+yet another after the Danes took the city a hundred years later. It
+was then in a good state to be destroyed by that devout William the
+Conqueror, who came to take the Saxon world in its sins of guttling
+and guzzling. The first Norman archbishop reconstructed or restored
+the church, and then it began to rise and to spread in glory--nave,
+transepts, and choir, and pillars and towers, Norman and Early English,
+and Perpendicular and Decorated--till it found itself at last what the
+American tourist sees it to-day. It suffered from two great fires in
+the nineteenth century, the first set by a lunatic who had the fancy of
+seeing it burn, but who had only the satisfaction of destroying part of
+the roof.
+
+It was never richly painted, but the color wanting in the walls and
+fretted vault was more than compensated by the mellowed splendors of
+the matchless windows. It was, indeed, fit to be the home of much more
+secular history than can be associated with it; but not till the end
+of the thirteenth century had the Minster a patron of its own, when St.
+William was canonized, and exercised his office, whatever it was, for
+two brief centuries. Then the Cromwell of Henry VIII. took possession
+of it in behalf of the crown, and the saint's charge was practically
+abolished. He was even deprived of his head, for the relic was encased
+in gold and jewels, and was therefore worth the king's having, who was
+most a friend of the reformed religion when it paid best. The later
+Cromwell, who beat a later king hard by at Marston Moor, must have
+somehow desecrated the Minster, though there is no record of any such
+fact. A more authentic monument of the religious difficulties of the
+times is the pastoral staff, bearing the arms of Catharine of Braganza,
+the poor little wife of Charles II., which was snatched from a Roman
+Catholic bishop when, to the high offence of Protestant piety, he was
+heading a procession in York in 1688. The verger showing us through the
+Minster was a good Protestant, but he held it bad taste in a predecessor
+of his, who when leading about a Catholic party of sight-seers took the
+captive staff from its place and shook it in their faces, saying, "Don't
+you wish you had it?"
+
+
+IV
+
+There is no telling to what lengths true religion, may rightly not go. I
+rather prize the incident as the sole fact concerning the Minster which
+I could make sure of even after repeated visits, and if I am indebted
+for my associations with it, long after the event, to Dr. Raine's
+scholarly and interesting sketch of York history, there is no reason
+why the better-informed reader should not accompany me in my last visit
+fully equipped. I walked slowly all round the structure, and fancied
+that I got a new sense of grandeur in the effect of the east window,
+which was, at any rate, more impressive than the north window. It was
+a long walk, almost the measure of such a walk as one should take after
+supper for one's health, and it had such incidents as many pauses for
+staring up at the many restorations going on. From point to point the
+incomparable Perpendicular Gothic carried the eye to the old gargoyles
+of the caves and towers waiting to be replaced by the new gargoyles,
+which lay in open-mouthed grimacing in the grass at the bases of the
+church. While I stood noting both, and thinking the chances were that I
+should never look on York Minster again, and feeling the luxurious pang
+of it, a verger in a skull-cap was so good as to come to a side door and
+parley long and pleasantly with a policeman. The simple local life went
+on around; people going to or from supper passed me; kind, vulgar
+noises came from the little houses bulging over the narrow, neighboring
+streets; there seemed to be the stamping of horses in a stable, and
+there was certainly the misaspirated talk about them. I could not have
+asked better material for the humble emotions I love; and I was more
+than content on my way home to find myself one of the congregation
+at the loud devotions of a detachment of the Salvation Army. After a
+battering of drums and a clashing of cymbals and a shouting of hymns,
+the worship settled to the prayer of a weak brother, who was so long in
+supplication that the head exhorter covered a yawn with his hand, and at
+the first sign of relenting in the supplicant bade the drums and cymbals
+strike up. Then, after a hymn, a sister, such a very plain, elderly
+sister, with hardly a tooth or an aitch in her head, began to relate her
+religious history. It appeared that she had been a much greater sinner
+than she looked, and that the mercy shown her had been proportionate.
+She was vain both of her sins and mercies, poor soul, and in her scrimp
+figure, with its ill-fitting uniform, Heaven knows how long she went on.
+I was distracted by a clergyman passing on the outside of the ring of
+listening women and children, and looking, I chose to think, somewhat
+sourly askance at the distasteful ceremonial. I wished to stop him,
+on his way to the Minster, if that was his way, and tell him that so
+Christianity must have begun, and so the latest form of it must
+always begin and work round after ages and ages to the beauty and
+respectability his own ritual has. But I now believe this would have
+been the greatest impertinence and hypocrisy, for I myself found the
+performance before us as tasteless and tawdry as he could possibly have
+done. He was going toward the Minster, and it would make him forget it;
+but I was going away from it, perhaps, for the last time, and this loud
+side-show of religion would make me forget the Minster.
+
+
+V
+
+Our railway hotel lay a little way out of the town, and after a day's
+sight-seeing we were to meet or mingle with troops of wholesome-looking
+workmen whose sturdiness and brightness were a consolation after
+the pale debility of labor's looks in Sheffield. From the
+chocolate-factories or the railroad-shops, which are the chief
+industries of York, they would be crossing the bridge of the Ouse, the
+famous stream on which the Romans had their town, and which suggested to
+the Anglicans to call their Eboracum Eurewic--a town on a river. In due
+time the Danes modified this name to Yerik, and so we came honestly by
+the name of our own New York, called after the old York, as soon as the
+English had robbed the Dutch of it, and the King of England had given
+the province to his brother the Duke of York. Both cities are still
+towns on rivers, but the Ouse is no more an image or forecast of the
+Hudson than Old York is of New York. For that reason, the bridge over
+it is not to be compared to our Brooklyn Bridge, or even to any bridge
+which is yet to span the Hudson. The difference is so greatly in our
+favor that we may well yield our city's mother the primacy in her city
+wall. We have ourselves as yet no Plantagenet wall, and we have not yet
+got a mediaeval gate through which the traveller passes in returning
+from the Flatiron Building to his hotel in the Grand Central Station.
+
+We do not begin to have such a hoar antiquity as is articulate in the
+mother city, speaking with muted voices from the innumerable monuments
+which the earth has yielded from the site of our hotel and its adjacent
+railway station. All underground York is doubtless fuller of Home than
+even Bath is; and it has happened that her civilization was much more
+largely dug up here than elsewhere when the foundations of the spreading
+edifices were laid. The relics are mainly the witnesses of pagan Rome,
+but Christianity politically began in York, as it has politically ended
+in New York, and doubtless some soldiers of the Sixth Legion and many of
+the British slaves were religiously Christians in the ancient metropolis
+before Constantine was elected emperor there.
+
+I have been in many places where history is hospitably at home and is
+not merely an unwilling guest, as in our unmemoried land. Florence is
+very well, Venice is not so bad, Naples has her long thoughts, and Milan
+is mediaeval-minded, not to speak of Genoa, or Marseilles, or Paris, or
+those romantic German towns where the legends, if not the facts, abound;
+but, after all, for my pleasure in the past, I could not choose any
+place before York. You need not be so very definite in your knowledge.
+The event of Constantine's presence and election is so spacious as to
+leave no room for particulars in the imagination; and you are so rich in
+it that you will even reject them from your thoughts, as you sit in
+the close-cropped flowery lawn of your hotel garden (try to imagine a
+railroad hotel garden in _New_ York!) on the sunniest of the afternoons
+before you are turned out for Doncaster Week, and, while you watch
+a little adventurous American boy climbing over a pile of rock-work,
+realize the most august, the most important fact in the story of the
+race as native to the very air you are breathing! Where you sit you are
+in full view of the Minster, which is to say in view of something like
+the towers and battlements of the celestial city. Or if you wake
+very early on a morning still nearer the fatal Doncaster Week of your
+impending banishment, and look out of your lofty windows at the sunrise
+reddening the level bars of cloud behind the Minster, you shall find it
+bulked up against the pearl-gray masses of the sunny mist which hangs
+in all the intervening trees, and solidifies them in unbroken masses of
+foliage. All round your hotel spreads a gridiron of railroad, yet such
+is the force of the English genius for quiet that you hear no clatter of
+trains; the expresses whir in and out of the station with not more noise
+than humming-birds; and amid this peace the past has some chance with
+modernity. The Britons dwell, unmolested by our latter-day clamor, in
+their wattled huts and dugouts; the Romans come and make them slaves and
+then Christians, and after three or four hundred years send word from
+the Tiber to the Ouse that they can stay no longer, and so leave them
+naked to their enemies, the Picts and Scots and Saxons and Angles; and
+in due course come the ravaging and burning Danes; and in due course
+still, the murdering and plundering and scorning Normans. But all so
+quietly, like the humming-bird-like expresses, with a kind of railway
+celerity in the foreshortened retrospect; and after the Normans have
+crushed themselves down into the mass of the vanquished, and formed the
+English out of the blend, there follow the many wars of the successions,
+of the Roses, of the Stuarts, with all the intermediate insurrections
+and rebellions. In the splendid Histories of Shakespeare, which are
+full of York, the imagination visits and revisits the place, and you are
+entreated by mouth of one of his princely personages,
+
+     "I pray you let us satisfy our eyes
+      With the memorials and things of fame,
+      That do renown this city,"
+
+where his Henrys and Richards and Margarets and Edwards and Eleanors
+abide still and shall forever abide while the English speech lasts.
+
+[Illustration: BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER]
+
+
+VI
+
+Something of all this I knew, and more pretended, with a mounting
+indignation at the fast-coming Doncaster Week which was to turn us out
+of our hotel. We began our search for other lodgings with what seemed to
+be increasing failure. The failure had consolation in it so far as the
+sweet regret of people whose apartments were taken could console. They
+would have taken us at other hotels for double the usual price, but,
+when we showed ourselves willing to pay, it proved that they had
+no rooms at any price. From house to house, then, we went, at first
+vaingloriously, in the spaces about the Minster, and then meekly into
+any side street, wherever the legend of Apartments showed itself in a
+transom. At last, the second day, after being denied at seven successive
+houses, we found quite the refuge we wanted in the Bootham, which means
+very much more than the ignorant reader can imagine. Our upper rooms
+looked on a pretty grassy garden space behind, where there was sun when
+there was sun, and in front on the fine old brick dwellings of a most
+personable street, with a sentiment of bygone fashion. At the upper end
+of it was a famous city gate--Bootham Bar, namely--with a practicable
+portcullis, which we verified at an early moment by going up into "the
+chamber over the gate," where it was once worked, and whence its lower
+beam, set thick with savage spikes, was dropped. Outside the gate there
+was a sign in the wall saying that guards were to be had there to guide
+travellers through the Forest of Galtres beyond Bootham, and keep them
+from the wolves. Now woods and wolves and guards are all gone, and
+Bootham Bar is never closed.
+
+The upper room is a passageway for people who are walking round the town
+on the Plantagenet wall, and one morning we took this walk in sunshine
+that befitted the Sabbath. Half the children of York seemed to be taking
+it, too, with their good parents, who had stayed away from church to
+give them this pleasure, the fathers putting on their frock-coats and
+top-hats, which are worn on no other days in the provincial cities of
+England. For a Plantagenet wall, that of York is in excellent repair,
+and it is very clean, so that the children could not spoil their Sunday
+best by clambering on the parapet, and trying to fall over it. There
+was no parapet on the other side, and they could have fallen over that
+without trouble; but it would not have served the same purpose; for
+under the parapet there were the most alluringly ragged little boys,
+with untidy goats and delightfully dirty geese. There was no trace of a
+moat outside the wall, where pleasant cottages pressed close to it
+with their gardens full of bright flowers. At one point there were
+far-spreading sheep and cattle pens, where there is a weekly market, and
+at another the old Norman castle which cruel Conqueror William built to
+hold the city, and which has suffered change, not unpicturesque,
+into prisons for unluckier criminals, and the Assize Courts for their
+condemnation. From time to time the wall left off, and then we got down,
+perforce, and walked to the next piece of it. In these pieces we
+made the most of the old gates, especially Walmgate Bar, which has a
+barbican. I should be at a loss to say why the barbican should have
+commended it so; perhaps it was because we there realized, for the first
+time, what a barbican was; I doubt if the reader knows, now. Otherwise,
+I should have preferred Monk Bar or Micklegate Bar, as being more like
+those I was used to in the theatre. But we came back gladly to Bootham
+Bar, holding that a portcullis was equal any day to a barbican, and
+feeling as if we had got home in the more familiar neighborhood.
+
+There were small shops in the Bootham, thread-and-needle stores,
+newspaper stores, and provision stores mainly, which I affected, and
+there was one united florist's and fruiterer's which I particularly
+liked because of the conversability of the proprietor. He was a stout
+man, of a vinous complexion, with what I should call here, where our
+speech is mostly uncouth, an educated accent, though with few and
+wandering aspirates in it. Him I visited every morning to buy for my
+breakfast one of those Spanish melons which they have everywhere in
+England, and which put our native cantaloupes to shame; and we always
+fell into a little talk over our transaction of fourpence or sixpence,
+as the case might be. After I had confided that I was an American, he
+said one day, "Ah, the Americans are clever people." Then he added,
+"I hope you won't mind my saying it, sir, but I think their ladies are
+rather harder than our English ladies, sir."
+
+"Yes," I eagerly assented. "How do you mean? Sharper? Keener?"
+
+"Well, not just that, sir."
+
+"More practical? More business-like?" I pursued.
+
+"Well, I shouldn't like to say that, sir. But--they seem rather harder,
+sir; at least, judging from what I see of them in York, sir. Rather
+harder, sir."
+
+We remained not the less friends with that mystery between us; and I
+bought my last melon of him on my last morning, when the early September
+had turned somewhat sharply chill. That turn made me ask what the winter
+was in York, and he boasted it very cold, with ice and snow aplenty,
+and degrees of frost much like our own. But apparently those York women
+resisted it and remained of a tenderness which contrasted to their
+advantage with the summer hardness of our women.
+
+
+VII
+
+It was a pleasure, which I should be glad to share with the reader, to
+lose one's self in the streets of York. They were all kinds of streets
+except straight, and they seemed not to go anywhere except for the
+joke of bringing the wayfarer unexpectedly back to, or near, his
+starting-point and far from his goal. The blame of their vagariousness,
+if it was a fault, is put upon the Danes, who found York when they
+captured it very rectangular, for so the Romans built it, and so the
+Angles kept it; but nothing would serve the Danes but to crook its
+streets and call them gates, so that the real gates of the city have to
+be called bars, or else the stranger might take them for streets. If he
+asked another wayfarer, he could sometimes baffle the streets, and get
+to the point he aimed at, but, whether he did or not, he could always
+amuse himself in them; they would take a friendly interest in him,
+and show him the old houses and churches which the American stranger
+prefers. They abound in the poorer sorts of buildings, of course, just
+as they do in the poorer sorts of people, but in their simpler courts
+and squares and expanses they have often dignified mansions of that
+Georgian architecture which seems the last word in its way, and which is
+known here in our older edifices as there in their newer. Some of them
+are said to have "richly carved ceilings, wainscoted, panelled rooms,
+chimneypieces with paintings framed in the over-mantel, dentilled
+cornices, and pedimented doors," and I could well believe it, as I
+passed them with an envious heart. There were gardens behind these
+mansions which hung their trees over the spiked coping of their
+high-shouldered walls and gates, and sequestered I know not what damp
+social events in their flowery and leafy bounds.
+
+[Illustration: WALMGATE BAR HAS A BARBICAN]
+
+At times I distinctly wished to know something of the life of York, but
+I was not in the way of it. The nearest to an acquaintance I had there,
+besides my critical fruiterer, was the actor whose name I recognized on
+his bills as that of a brave youth who had once dramatized a novel of
+mine, and all too briefly played the piece, and who was now to come
+to York for a week of Shakespeare. Perhaps I could not forgive him the
+recrudescence; at any rate, I did not try to see him, and there was no
+other social chance for me, except as I could buy in for a few glimpses
+at the tidy confectioners', where persons of civil condition resorted
+for afternoon tea. Even to these one could not speak, and I could only
+do my best in a little mercenary conversation with the bookseller about
+York histories. The bookstores were not on our scale, and generally the
+shops in York were not of the modern department type, but were perhaps
+the pleasanter for that reason.
+
+In my earlier wanderings I made the acquaintance of a most agreeable
+market-place, stretching the length of two squares, which on a Saturday
+afternoon I found filled with every manner of bank and booth and
+canopied counter, three deep, and humming pleasantly with traffic in
+everything one could eat, drink, wear, or read; there seemed as many
+book-stalls as fruit-stalls. What I noted equally with the prettiness
+of the abounding flowers was the mild kindness of the market-people's
+manners and their extreme anxiety to state exactly the quality of the
+things they had for sale. They seemed incapable of deceit, but I do
+not say they really were so. My own transactions were confined to the
+purchase of some golden-gage plums, and I advise the reader rather to
+buy greengages; the other plums practised the deception in their looks
+which their venders abhorred.
+
+
+VIII
+
+I wandered in a perfectly contemporary mood through the long ranks and
+lanes of the marketplace, and did not know till afterward that at one
+end of it, called the Pavement, the public executions used to take place
+for those great or small occasions which brought folks to the block or
+scaffold in the past. I had later some ado to verify the dismal fact
+from a cluster of people before a tavern who seemed to be taking bets
+for the Doncaster Week, and I could hardly keep them from booking me
+for this horse or that when I merely wanted to know whether it was on a
+certain spot the Earl of Northumberland had his head cut off for leading
+a rising against Henry IV.; or some such execution.
+
+What riches of story has not York to browbeat withal the storyless
+New-Yorker who visits her! That Henry IV. was he whom I had lately seen
+triumphing near Shrewsbury in the final battle of the Roses, where the
+Red was so bloodily set above the White; and it was his poetic fancy
+to have Northumberland, when he bade him come to York, pass through the
+gateway on which the head of his son, Hotspur Harry, was festering. No
+wonder the earl led a rising against his liege, who had first mercifully
+meant to imprison him for life, and then more mercifully pardoned him.
+But there seems to have been fighting up and down the centuries from the
+beginning, in York, interspersed with praying and wedding and feasting.
+After the citizens drove out Conqueror William's garrison, and Earl
+Waltheof provided against the Normans' return by standing at the castle
+gate and chopping their heads off with his battle-axe as they came
+forth, William efficaciously devastated the city and the country as far
+as Durham. His son William gave it a church, and that "worthy peer,"
+King Stephen, a hospital. In his time the archbishop and barons of York
+beat the Scotch hard by, and the next Scotch king had to do homage to
+Henry II. at York for his kingdom. Henry III. married his sister at York
+to one Scotch king and his daughter to that king's successor. Edward I.
+and his queen Eleanor honored with their presence the translation of St.
+William's bones to the Minster; Edward II. retreated from his defeat at
+Bannockburn to York, and Edward III. was often there for a king's
+varied occasions of fighting and feasting. Weak Henry VI. and his wilful
+Margaret, after their defeat at Towton by Edward IV., escaped from the
+city just in time, and Edward entered York under his own father's head
+on Micklegate Bar. Richard III. was welcomed there before his rout and
+death at Bosworth, and was truly mourned by the citizens. Henry VII.
+wedded Elizabeth, the "White Rose of York," and afterward visited her
+city; Mary, Queen of Scots, was once in hiding there, and her uncouth
+son stayed two nights in York on his way to be crowned James I. in
+London. His son, Charles I., was there early in his reign, and touched
+many for the king's evil; later, he was there again, but could not cure
+the sort of king's evil which raged past all magic in the defeat of his
+followers at Marston Moor by Cromwell. The city yielded to the Puritans,
+whose temperament had already rather characterized it. James II., as
+Duke of York, made it his brief sojourn; "proud Cumberland," returning
+from Culloden after the defeat of the Pretender, visited the city
+and received its freedom for destroying the last hope of the Stuarts;
+perhaps the twenty-two rebels who were then put to death in York were
+executed in the very square where those wicked men thought I was wanting
+to play the horses. The reigning family has paid divers visits to the
+ancient metropolis, which was the capital of Britain before London was
+heard of. The old prophecy of her ultimate primacy must make time if
+it is to fulfil itself and increase York's seventy-two thousand beyond
+London's six million.
+
+
+IX
+
+I should be at a loss to say why its English memories haunted my York
+less than the Roman associations of the place. They form, however,
+rather a clutter of incidents, whereas the few spreading facts of
+Hadrian's stay, the deaths of Severus and Constantius, and the election
+of Constantine, his son, enlarge themselves to the atmospheric compass
+of the place, but leave a roominess in which the fancy may more
+commodiously orb about. I was on terms of more neighborly intimacy
+with the poor Punic emperor than with any one else in York, doubtless
+because, when he fell sick, he visited the temple of Bellona near
+Bootham Bar, and paid his devotions unmolested, let us hope, by any
+prevision of the misbehavior of his son Caracalla (whose baths I had
+long ago visited at Rome) in killing his other son Geta. Everywhere I
+could be an early Christian, in company with Constantine, in whom the
+instinct of political Christianity must have begun to stir as soon as he
+was chosen emperor. But I dare say I heard the muted tramp of the Sixth
+Legion about the Yorkish streets above all other martial sounds because
+I stayed as long as Doncaster Week would let me in the railway hotel,
+which so many of their bones made room for when the foundations of it
+were laid, with those of the adherent station. Their bones seem to
+have been left there, after the disturbance, but their sepulchres were
+respectfully transferred to the museum of the Philosophical Society, in
+the grounds where the ruins of St. Mary's Abbey rise like fragments
+of pensive music or romantic verse, inviting the moonlight and the
+nightingale, but, wanting these, make shift with the noonday and the
+babies in perambulators neglected by nurse-girls reading novels.
+
+[Illustration: ST. MARY'S ABBEY]
+
+The babies and the nurses are not allowed in the museum of antiquities,
+which is richer in Roman remains than any that one sees outside of
+Italy. There are floors of mosaic, large and perfect, taken from the
+villas which people are always digging up in the neighborhood of York,
+and, from the graves uncovered in the railway excavations, coffins of
+lead and stone for civilians, and of rude tiles for the soldiers of the
+Sixth Legion; the slaves were cast into burial-pits of tens and twenties
+and left to indiscriminate decay till they should be raised in the
+universal incorruption. Probably the slaves were the earliest Christians
+at York; certainly the monuments are pagan, as the inmates of the tombs
+must have been. Some of the monuments bear inscriptions from loving
+wives and husbands to the partners they have lost, and some of the stone
+coffins are those of children. It is all infinitely touching, and after
+two thousand years the heart aches for the fathers and mothers who laid
+their little ones away in these hard cradles for their last sleep.
+Faith changes, but constant death remains the same, and life is not very
+different in any age, when it comes to the end. The Roman exiles who had
+come so far to hold my British ancestors in subjection to their alien
+rule seemed essentially not only of the same make as me, but the
+same civilization. Their votive altars and inscriptions to other gods
+expressed a human piety of like anxiety and helplessness with ours, and
+called to a like irresponsive sky. A hundred witnesses of their mortal
+state--jars and vases and simple household utensils--fill the shelves of
+the museum; but the most awful, the most beautiful appeal of the past is
+in that mass of dark auburn hair which is kept here in a special urn and
+uncovered for your supreme emotion. It is equally conjectured to be the
+hair of a Roman lady or of a British princess, but is of a young girl
+certainly, dressed twenty centuries ago for the tomb in which it was
+found, and still faintly lucent with the fashionable unguent of the day,
+and kept in form by pins of jet. One thinks of the little, slender hands
+that used to put them there, and of the eyes that confronted themselves
+in the silver mirror under the warm shadow that the red-gold mass
+cast upon the white forehead. This sanctuary of the past was the most
+interesting place in that most interesting city of York, and the day of
+our first visit a princess of New York sat reading a book in the midst
+of it, waiting for the rain to be over, which was waiting for her to
+come out and then begin again. We knew her from having seen her at the
+station in relation to some trunks bearing her initials and those of
+her native city; and she could be about the age of the York princess or
+young Roman lady whose hair was kept in the urn hard by.
+
+
+X
+
+There is in York a little, old, old church, whose dear and reverend
+name I have almost forgotten, if ever I knew it, but I think it is Holy
+Trinity Goodramgate, which divides the heart of my adoration with the
+Minster. We came to it quite by accident, one of our sad September
+afternoons, after we had been visiting the Guildhall, Venetianly
+overhanging the canal calm of the Ouse, and very worthy to be seen for
+its York histories in stained glass. The custodian had surprised us and
+the gentlemen of the committee by taking us into the room where they
+were investigating the claims of the registered voters to the suffrage;
+and so, much entertained and instructed, we issued forth, and, passing
+by the church in which Guy Fawkes was baptized, only too ineffectually,
+we came quite unexpectedly upon Holy Trinity Goodramgate, if that and
+not another is indeed its name.
+
+It stands sequestered in a little leafy and grassy space of its own,
+with a wall hardly overlooked on one side by low stone cottages, the
+immemorial homes of rheumatism and influenza. The church had the air
+of not knowing that it is of Perpendicular and Decorated Gothic, with
+a square, high-shouldered tower, as it bulks up to a very humble
+height from the turf to the boughs overhead, or that it has a nice
+girl sketching its doorway, where a few especially favored weddings and
+funerals may enter. It is open once a year for service, and when the
+tourist will, or can, for the sight of the time-mellowed, beautiful
+stained glass of its eastward window. The oaken pews are square and
+high-shouldered, like the low church tower; and, without, the soft
+yellow sandstone is crumbling away from the window traceries. The church
+did not look as if it felt itself a thousand years old, and perhaps it
+is not; but I never was in a place where I seemed so like a ghost of
+that antiquity. I had a sense of haunting it, in the inner twilight and
+the outer sunlight, where a tender wind was stirring the leaves of its
+embowering trees and scattering them on the graves of my eleventh and
+twelfth century contemporaries.
+
+
+XI
+
+We chose the sunniest morning we could for our visit to Clifford's
+Tower, which remains witness of the Norman castle the Conqueror built
+and rebuilt to keep the Danish-Anglian-Roman-British town in awe. But
+the tower was no part of the original castle, and only testifies of it
+by hearsay. That was built by Roger de Clifford, who suffered death with
+his party chief, the Earl of Lancaster, when Edward of York took the
+city, and it is mainly memorable as the refuge of the Jews whom the
+Christians had harried out of their homes. They had grown in numbers and
+riches, when the Jew-hate of 1190 broke out in England, as from time
+to time the Jew-hate breaks out in Russia now, to much the same cruel
+effect. They were followed and besieged in the castle, and, seeing that
+they must be captured, they set fire to the place, and five hundred slew
+themselves. Some that promised to be Christians came out and were killed
+by their brethren in Christ. In New York the Christians have grown
+milder, and now they only keep the Jews out of their clubs and their
+homes.
+
+[Illustration: CLIFFORD'S TOWER]
+
+The Clifford Tower leans very much to one side, so that as you ascend it
+for the magnificent view from the top you have to incline yourself the
+other way, as you do in the Tower of Pisa, to help it keep its balance.
+The morning of our visit, so gay in its forgetfulness of the tragical
+past, we found the place in charge of an old soldier, an Irishman who
+had learned, as custodian, a professional compassion for those poor Jews
+of nine hundred years ago, and, being moved by our confession of our
+nationality, owned to three "nevvies" in New Haven. So small is the
+world and so closely knit in the ties of a common humanity and a common
+citizenship, native and adoptive!
+
+The country around York looked so beautiful from Clifford's Tower that
+we would not be satisfied till we had seen it closer, and we chose a
+bright, cool September afternoon for our drive out of the town and over
+the breezy, high levels which surround it. The first British capital
+could hardly have been more nobly placed, and one could not help
+grieving that the Ouse should have indolently lost York that early
+dignity by letting its channel fill up with silt and spoil its
+navigation. The Thames managed better for York's upstart rival London,
+and yet the Ouse is not destitute of sea or river craft. These were of
+both steam and sail, and I myself have witnessed the energy with which
+the reluctance of the indolent stream is sometimes overcome. I do not
+suppose that anywhere else, when the wind is low, is a vessel madly
+hurled through the water at a mile an hour by means of a rope tied
+to its mast and pulled by a fatherly old horse under the intermittent
+drivership of two boys whom he could hardly keep to the work. I loved
+the banks of a stream where one could see such a triumph of man over
+nature, and where nature herself was so captivating. All that grassy
+and shady neighborhood seemed a public promenade, where on a Sunday one
+could see the lower middle classes in their best and brightest, and
+it had for all its own the endearing and bewitching name of Ings. Why
+cannot we have Ings by the Hudson side?
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+TWO YORKISH EPISODES
+
+
+Certainly I had not come to York, as certainly I would not have gone
+anywhere, for battle-fields, but becoming gradually sensible in that
+city that the battle of Marston Moor was fought a few miles away, and
+my enemy Charles I. put to one of his worst defeats there, I bought a
+third-class ticket and ran out to the place one day for whatever emotion
+awaited me there.
+
+
+I
+
+At an English station you are either overwhelmed with transportation,
+or you are without any except such as you were born with, and at the
+station for Marston Moor I asked for a fly in vain. But it was a most
+walkable afternoon, and the pleasant road into the region which the
+station-master indicated as that I was seeking invited the foot by its
+level stretch, sometimes under wayside trees, but mostly between open
+fields, newly reaped and still yellow with their stubble, or green with
+the rowen clover. Sometimes it ran straight and sometimes it curved,
+but it led so rarely near any human habitation that one would rather not
+have met any tramps beside one's self on it. Presently I overtook one, a
+gentle old farm-wife, a withered blonde, whom I helped with the bundles
+she bore in either hand, in the hope that she could tell me whether I
+was near Marston Moor or not. But she could tell me only, what may have
+been of higher human interest, that her husband had the grass farm of
+a hundred and fifty acres, which we were coming to, for seventy-five
+pounds a year; and they had their own cattle, sheep, and horses, and
+were well content with themselves. She excused herself for not knowing
+more than vaguely of the battle-field, as not having been many years
+in the neighborhood; and being now come to a gate in the fields, she
+thanked me and took her way up a grassy path to the pleasant farmhouse I
+saw in the distance.
+
+It must have been about this time that it rained, having shone long
+enough for English weather, and it hardly held up before I was overtaken
+by a friendly youth on a bicycle, whom I stayed with the question
+uppermost in my mind. He promptly got off his wheel to grapple with the
+problem. He was a comely young fellow, an artisan of some sort from
+a neighboring town, and he knew the country well, but he did not know
+where my lost battle-field was. He was sure that it was near by: but he
+was sure there was no monument to mark the spot. Then we parted friends,
+with many polite expressions, and he rode on and I walked on.
+
+For a mile and more I met no other wayfarer, and as I felt that it was
+time to ask for Marston Moor again, I was very glad to be overtaken by
+a gentleman driving in a dog-cart, with his pretty young daughter on
+the wide seat with him. He halted at sight of the elderly pilgrim, and
+hospitably asked if he could not give him a lift, alleging that there
+was plenty of room. He was interested in my search, which he was not
+able definitely to promote, but he believed that if I would drive with
+him to his place I could find the battle-field, and, anyhow, I could get
+a trap back from the The Sun. I pleaded the heat I was in from walking,
+and the danger for an old fellow of taking cold in a drive through the
+cool air; and then, as old fellows do, we bantered each other about
+our ages, each claiming to be older than the other, and the kind, sweet
+young girl sat listening with that tolerance of youth for the triviality
+of age which is so charming. When he could do no more, he said he was
+sorry, and wished me luck, and drove on; and I being by this time tired
+with my three miles' tramp, took advantage of a wayside farmhouse, the
+first in all the distance, and went in and asked for a cup of tea.
+
+The farm-wife, who came in out of her back garden to answer my knock,
+pleaded regretfully that her fire was down; but she thought I could
+get tea at the next house; and she was very conversable about the
+battle-field. She did not know just where it was, but she was sure it
+was quite a mile farther on; and at that I gave up the hope of it along
+with the tea. This is partly the reader's loss, for I have no doubt
+I could have been very graphic about it if I had found it; but as for
+Marston Moor, I feel pretty certain that if it ever existed it does not
+now. A moor, as I understand, implies a sort of wildness, but nothing
+could be more domestic than the peaceful fields between which I had come
+so far, and now easily found my way back to the station. Easily, I say,
+but there was one point where the road forked, though I was sure it
+had not forked before, and I felt myself confronted with some sort,
+any sort, of exciting adventure. By taking myself firmly in hand, and
+saying, "It was yonder to the left where I met my kind bicycler, and we
+vainly communed of my evanescent battle-field," and so keeping on, I got
+safely to the station with nothing more romantic in my experience than a
+thrilling apprehension.
+
+
+II
+
+I quite forgot Marston Moor in my self-gratulation and my recognition
+of the civility from every one which had so ineffectively abetted my
+search. Simple and gentle, how hospitable they had all been to my vain
+inquiry, and how delicately they had forborne to visit the stranger
+with the irony of the average American who is asked anything, especially
+anything he does not know! I went thinking that the difference was a
+difference between human nature long mellowed to its conditions, and
+human nature rasped on its edges and fretted by novel circumstances to a
+provisional harshness. I chose to fancy that unhuman nature sympathized
+with the English mood; in the sheep bleating from the pastures I heard
+the note of Wordsworth's verse; and by the sky, hung in its low
+blue with rough, dusky clouds, I was canopied as with a canvas of
+Constable's.
+
+It was the more pity, then, that at the station a shooting party,
+approaching from the other quarter with their servants and guns and
+dogs, and their bags of hares and partridges, should have given English
+life another complexion to the wanderer so willing to see it always
+rose color. The gunners gained the station platform first, and at once
+occupied the benches, strewing all the vacant places with their still
+bleeding prey. I did not fail of the opportunity to see in them the
+arrogance of class, which I had hitherto so vainly expected, and I
+disabled their looks by finding them as rude as their behavior. How
+different they were from the kind bicycler, or the gentleman in the
+dog-cart, or either one of the farm-wives who sorrowed so civilly not to
+know where my lost battle-field was!
+
+In England, it is always open to the passenger to enforce a claim to
+his share of the public facilities, but I chose to go into the licensed
+victualler's next the station and sit down to a peaceable cup of tea
+rather than contest a place on that bloody benching; and so I made the
+acquaintance of an interior out of literature, such as my beloved Thomas
+Hardy likes to paint. On a high-backed rectangular settle rising against
+the wall, and almost meeting in front of the comfortable range, sat a
+company of rustics, stuffing themselves with cold meat, washed down with
+mugs of ale, and cozily talking. They gained indefinitely in my interest
+from being served by a lame woman, with a rhythmical limp, and I hope it
+was not for my demerit that I was served apart in the chillier parlor,
+when I should have liked so much to stay and listen to the rustic tale
+or talk. The parlor was very depressingly papered, but on its walls I
+had the exalted company of his Majesty the King, their Royal Highnesses
+the Prince and Princess of Wales, the late Premier, the Marquis of
+Salisbury, and, for no assignable reason except a general fitness for
+high society, the twelve Apostles in Da Vinci's _Last Supper_, together
+with an appropriate view of York Minster.
+
+
+III
+
+I do not pretend this search for the battle-field of Marston Moor was
+the most exciting episode of my stay in York. In fact, I think it
+was much surpassed in a climax of dramatic poignancy incident to our
+excursion to Bishopsthorpe, down the Ouse, on one of the cosey little
+steamers which ply the stream without unreasonably crowding it against
+its banks. It was a most silvery September afternoon when we started
+from the quay at York, and after escaping from embarkment on a boat
+going in the wrong direction, began, with no unseemly swiftness, to
+scuttle down the current. It was a perfect voyage, as perfect as any I
+ever made on the Mississippi, the Ohio, the St. Lawrence, or the Hudson,
+on steamers in whose cabins our little boat would have lost itself. We
+had a full but not crowded company of passengers, overflowing into
+a skiff at our stern, in which a father and mother, with three women
+friends, preferred the high excitement of being towed to Bishopsthorpe,
+where it seemed that the man of the party knew the gardener. With each
+curve of the river and with each remove we got the city in more and more
+charming retrospective, till presently its roofs and walls and spires
+and towers were lost in the distance, and we were left to the sylvan
+or pastoral loveliness of the low shores. Here and there at a pleasant
+interval from the river a villa rose against a background of rounded
+tree tops, with Lombardy poplars picking themselves out before it, but
+for the most part the tops of the banks, with which we stood even on
+our deck, retreated from the waterside willows in levels of meadow-land,
+where white and red cows were grazing, and now and then young horses
+romping away from groups of their elders. It was all dear and kind and
+sweet, with a sort of mid-Western look in its softness (as the English
+landscape often has), and the mud-banks were like those of my native
+Ohio Valley rivers. The effect was heightened, on our return, by an
+aged and virtuously poor (to all appearance) flageolet and cornet band,
+playing _'Way down upon the Suwanee River_, while the light played in
+"ditties no-tone" over the groves and pastures of the shore, and the
+shadows stretched themselves luxuriously out as if for a long night's
+sleep. There has seldom been such a day since I began to grow old; a
+soft September gale ruffled and tossed the trees finely, and a subtle
+Italian quality mixed with the American richness of the sunshiny air; so
+that I thought we reached Bishopsthorpe only too soon, and I woke from a
+pleasant reverie to be told that the steamer could not land with us, but
+we must be taken ashore in the small boat which we saw putting out for
+us from its moorings. To this day I do not know why the steamer could
+not land, but perhaps the small boat had a prescriptive right in the
+matter. At any rate, it was vigorously manned by a woman, who took
+tuppence from each of us for her service, and presently earned it by the
+interest she showed in our getting to the Archbishop's palace, or villa,
+the right way.
+
+[Illustration: YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER]
+
+So we went round by an alluring road to its forking, where, looking up
+to the left, we could see a pretty village behind Lombardy poplars,
+and coming down toward us in a victoria for their afternoon drive,
+two charmingly dressed ladies, with bright parasols, and looking very
+county-family, as we poor Americans imagine such things out of English
+fiction. We entered the archiepiscopal grounds through a sympathetic
+Gothic screen, as I will call the overture to the Gothic edifice in my
+defect of architectural terminology, though perhaps gateway would be
+simpler; and found ourselves in the garden, and in the company of
+those people we had towed down behind our steamer. They were with
+their friend, the gardener, and, claiming their acquaintance as
+fellow-passengers, we made favor with him to see the house. The
+housekeeper, or some understudy of hers, who received us, said the
+family were away, but she let us follow her through. That is more than
+I will let the reader do, for I know the duty of the cultivated American
+to the intimacies of the gentle English life; it is only with the simple
+life that I ever make free; there, I own, I have no scruple. But I will
+say (with my back turned conscientiously to the interior) that nothing
+could be lovelier than the outlook from the dining-room, and the whole
+waterfront of the house, on the wavy and willowy Ouse, and that I would
+willingly be many times an archbishop to have that prospect at all my
+meals.
+
+
+IV
+
+We despatched our visit so promptly that we got back to our boat-woman's
+cottage a full hour before our steamer was to call for us. She had an
+afternoon fire kindled in her bright range, from the oven of which came
+already the odor of agreeable baking. Upon this hint we acted, and
+asked if tea were possible. It was, and jam sandwiches as well, or if
+we preferred buttered tea-cake, with or without currants, to jam
+sandwiches, there would be that presently. We preferred both, and we sat
+down in that pleasant parlor-kitchen, and listened, till the tea-cake
+came out of the oven and was split open and buttered smoking hot, to
+a flow of delightful and instructive talk. For our refection we paid
+sixpence each, but for our edification we are still, and hope ever to
+be, in debt. Our hostess was of a most cheerful philosophy, such as
+could not be bought of most modern philosophers for money. The flour for
+our tea-cakes, she said, was a shilling fivepence a stone, "And not too
+much for growing and grinding it, and all." Every week-day morning she
+rose at half-past four, and got breakfast for her boys, who then rode
+their bicycles, or, in the snow, walked, all the miles of our voyage
+into York, where they worked in the railway shops. No, they did not
+belong to any union; the railway men did not seem to care for it; only a
+"benefit union."
+
+She kept the house for her family, and herself ready to answer every
+hail from the steamer; but in her mellow English content, which was not
+stupid or sodden, but clever and wise, it was as if it were she, rather
+than the archbishop, whose nature expressed itself in a motto on one
+of the palace walls, "Blessed be the Lord who loadeth us with blessings
+every day."
+
+When the range, warming to its work, had made her kitchen-parlor a
+little too hot to hold us, she hospitably suggested the river shore as
+cooler, where she knew a comfortable log we could sit on. Thither she
+presently followed when the steamer's whistle sounded, and held her
+boat for us to get safely in. The most nervous of our party offered
+the reflection, as she sculled us out into the stream to overhaul the
+pausing steamer, that she must find the ferry business very shattering
+to the nerves, and she said,
+
+"Yes, but it's nothing to a murder case I was on, once."
+
+"Oh, what murder, what murder?" we palpitated back; and both of us
+forgot the steamer, so that it almost ran us down, while our ferrywoman
+began again:
+
+"A man shot a nurse--There! Throw that line, will you?"
+
+But he, who ought to have thrown the line for her, in his distraction
+let her drop her oar and throw the line herself, and then we scrambled
+aboard without hearing any more of the murder.
+
+This is the climax I have been working up to, and I call it a fine one;
+as good as a story to be continued ever ended an instalment with.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
+
+
+The Doncaster Races lured us from our hotel at York, on the first day,
+as I had dimly foreboded they would. In fact, if there had been no lure,
+I might have gone in search of temptation, for in a world where sins are
+apt to be ugly, a horse-race is so beautiful that if one loves beauty
+he can practise an aesthetic virtue by sinning in that sort. So I
+made myself a pretence of profit as well as pleasure, and in going to
+Doncaster I feigned the wish chiefly to compare its high event with that
+of Saratoga. I had no association with the place save horse-racing, and
+having missed Ascot and Derby Day, I took my final chance in pursuit
+of knowledge--I said to myself, "Not mere amusement"--and set out for
+Doncaster unburdened by the lightest fact concerning the place.
+
+
+I
+
+I learned nothing of it when there, but I have since learned, from
+divers trustworthy sources, that Doncaster is the Danum of Antoninus and
+the Dona Ceaster of the Saxons, and that it is not only on the line of
+the Northeastern Railway, but also on that famous Watling Street which
+from the earliest Saxon time has crossed the British continent from sea
+to sea, and seems to impress most of the cities north and south into a
+conformity with its line, like a map of the straightest American railway
+routes.
+
+Unless my ignorance has been abused, nothing remarkable has happened
+at Doncaster in two thousand years, but this is itself a distinction in
+that eventful England where so many things have happened elsewhere.
+It is the market town of a rich farming region, and has notable
+manufactures of iron and brass, of sacking and linen, of spun flax and
+of agricultural machines and implements. Otherwise, it is important only
+for its races, which began there three hundred years ago, and especially
+for its St. Leger Day, of which Lieutenant-General St. Leger became the
+patron saint in 1778, though he really established his Day two years
+earlier.
+
+Doncaster is a mighty pleasant, friendly, rather modern, and
+commonplacely American-looking town, with two-story trams gently ambling
+up and down its chief avenues, in the leisurely English fashion, and
+all of more or less arrival and departure at the race-grounds. In our
+company the reader will have our appetites for lunch, and if he will
+take his chance with us in the first simple place away from the station,
+he will help us satisfy them very wholesomely and agreeably at boards
+which seem festively set up for the occasion, and spread with hot
+roast-beef and the plain vegetables which accompany the national dish
+in its native land; or he can have the beef cold, or have cold lamb or
+chicken cold. His fellow-lunchers will be, as he may like well enough
+to fancy, of somewhat lower degree than himself, but they will all seem
+very respectable, and when they come out together, they will all be
+equalized in the sudden excitement which has possessed itself of the
+street, and lined the curbstones up and down with spectators, their
+bodies bent forward, and their faces turned in the direction of the
+station.
+
+
+II
+
+The excitement is caused by the coming of the King; and I wish that I
+could present that event in just its sincere unimpressiveness. I have
+assisted at several such events on the Continent, where, especially in
+Germany, they are heralded as they are in the theatre, with a blare of
+trumpets, and a sensation in the populace and the attendant military
+little short of an ague fit. There, as soon as the majesties mount into
+their carriages from the station, they drive off as swiftly as their
+horses can trot, and their subjects, who have been waiting for hours to
+see them, make what they can of a meagre half-minute's glimpse of
+them. But how different was the behavior of that easy-going Majesty of
+England! As soon as I heard that he was coming, I perceived how anxious
+I had been in the half-year of my English sojourn to see him, and how
+bitterly I should have been disappointed to leave his realms without it.
+All kings are bad, I knew that well enough; but I also knew that some
+kings are not so bad as others, and I had been willing to accept at
+their face the golden opinions of this King, which, almost without
+exception, his lieges seemed to hold. Of course it is not hard to think
+well of a king if you are under him, just as it is not hard to think
+ill of him if you are not under him; but there is no use being bigotedly
+republican when there is nothing to be got by it, and I own the fact
+that his subjects like him willingly. Probably no man in his kingdom
+understands better than Edward VII. that he is largely a form, and that
+the more a form he is the more conformable he is to the English ideal
+of a monarch. But no Englishman apparently knows better than he when to
+leave off being a form and become a man, and he has endeared himself to
+his people from time to time by such inspirations. He is reputed on all
+hands to be a man of great good sense; if he is ever fooled it is not by
+himself, but by the system which he is no more a part of than the least
+of his subjects. If he will let a weary old man or a delicate woman
+stand indefinitely before him, he is no more to blame for that than for
+speaking English with a trace of German in his _th_ sounds; he did not
+invent his origins or his traditions. Personally, having had it out with
+life, he is as amiable and as unceremonious as a king may be. He shares,
+as far as he can, the great and little interests of his people. He has
+not, so far as noted, the gifts of some of his sisters, but he has much
+of his mother's steadfast wisdom, and his father's instinct for the
+right side in considerable questions; and he has his father's prescience
+of the psychological moment for not bothering. Of course, he is a
+fetish; no Englishman can deny that the kingship is an idolatry; but
+he is a fetish with an uncommon share of the common man's divinity.
+The system which provides him for the people provides them the best
+administration in the world, always naturally in the hands of their
+superiors, social and political; but we could be several times rottener
+than we administratively are, and still be incalculably reasonabler, as
+republicans, than those well-governed monarchists.
+
+[Illustration: DURHAM CATHEDRAL--NORTHWEST VIEW]
+
+Some of us are apt to forget the immense advantage which we have of the
+monarchical peoples in having cast away the very name of King, for with
+the name goes the nature of royalty and all that is under and around it.
+But because we are largely a fond and silly folk, with a false conceit
+of ourselves and others, we like to make up romances about the favor in
+which thrones, municipalities, and powers hold us. Once it was the Tsar
+of Russia who held us dear, and would do almost anything for Americans;
+now it is the King of England who is supposed rather to prefer us to his
+own people, and to delight to honor us. We attribute to him a feeling
+which a little thought would teach, us was wholly our own, and which
+would be out of nature if not out of reason with him. He is a man of
+sense, and not of sentiment, and except as a wise politician he could
+have no affection for a nation whose existence denies him. He is very
+civil to Americans; it is part of a constitutional king's business to be
+civil to every one; but he is probably not sentimental about us; and we
+need not be sentimental about him.
+
+He looked like a man of sense, and not like a man of sentiment, that
+day as he drove through the Doncaster street on his way to the sport he
+loves beyond any other sport. He sat with three other gentlemen on the
+sidewise seats of the trap, preceded by outriders, which formed the
+simple turnout of the greatest prince in the world. He was at the end on
+the right, and he showed fully as stout as he was, in the gray suit he
+wore, while he lifted his gray top-hat now and then, bowing casually,
+almost absently, to the spectators fringing, not too deeply, the
+sidewalks. He was very, very stout, even after many seasons of
+Marienbad, and after the sufferings he had lately undergone, and he
+was quite like the pictures and effigies of him, down to those on the
+postage-stamps. He has a handsome face, still bearded in the midst of a
+mostly clean-shaving nation, and with the white hairs prevalent on
+the cheeks and temples; his head is bald atop, though hardly from the
+uneasiness of wearing a crown.
+
+It was difficult to realize him for what he was, and in the unmilitary
+keeping of a few policemen, he was not of the high histrionic presence
+that those German majesties were. The good-natured crowd did not strain
+itself in cheering, though it seemed to cheer cordially; and it did
+not stay long after the trap tooled comfortably away. I then addressed
+myself to a little knot of railway servants who lingered talking, and
+asked them what some carriages were still waiting for at the door of the
+station, and one of them answered with a lightness you do not expect
+in England, "Oh, Lord This, and Lady That, and the Hon. Mr.
+I-don't-know-what's-his-name." The others laughed at this ribald satire
+of the upper classes, and I thought it safer to follow the King to the
+races lest I should hear worse things of them.
+
+
+III
+
+The races were some miles away, and when we got to the tracks we did
+not find their keeping very different from that of the Saratoga tracks,
+although the crowd was both smarter and shabbier, and it had got to the
+place through a town of tents and sheds, and a population of hucksters
+and peddlers, giving an effect of permanency to the festivity such as
+a solemnity of ours seldom has. When we bought our tickets we found, in
+the familiarity with the event expected of us, that there was no one to
+show us to our places; but by dint of asking we got to the Grand Stand,
+and mounted to our seats, which, when we stood up from them, commanded a
+wholly satisfactory prospect of the whole field.
+
+I do not know the dimensions of the Doncaster track, or how far they
+exceed those of the Saratoga track. Possibly one does not do its extent
+justice because there is no track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a
+green turf, with a certain course railed off on it. I hope the reader
+will be as much surprised as I was to realize that the sport of
+horse-racing in England gets its name of Turf from the fact that the
+races are run on the grass, and not on the bare ground, as with us. We
+call the sport the Turf, too, but that is because in this, as in so many
+other things, we lack incentive and invention, and are fondly colonial
+and imitative; we ought to call it the Dirt, for that is what it is with
+us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the definition in England which
+our course gives, and when it began, I missed the relief into which our
+track throws the bird-like sweep of the horses as they skim the naked
+earth in the distance.
+
+I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances
+the thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so
+scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the
+shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so
+much gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The
+crowd thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see,
+and bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with
+the shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the
+book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here.
+With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins;
+but I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at
+the Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the
+horse next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty close.
+By the end of the third or how far they exceed those of the Saratoga
+track. Possibly one does not do its extent justice because there is no
+track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a green turf, with a certain
+course railed off on it. I hope the reader will be as much surprised as
+I was to realize that the sport of horse-racing in England gets its name
+of Turf from the fact that the races are run on the grass, and not on
+the bare ground, as with us. We call the sport the Turf, too, but that
+is because in this, as in so many other things, we lack incentive and
+invention, and are fondly colonial and imitative; we ought to call it
+the Dirt, for that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the racing
+lacks the definition in England which our course gives, and when it
+began, I missed the relief into which our track throws the bird-like
+sweep of the horses as they skim the naked earth in the distance.
+
+I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances
+the thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so
+scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the
+shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so
+much gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The
+crowd thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see,
+and bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with
+the shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the
+book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here.
+With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins;
+but I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at
+the Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the
+horse next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty
+close. By the end of the third race he had softened into something like
+confidence toward me; certainly into conversability; such was the effect
+of my being a dead-game sport, or looking it. But how account for the
+trustfulness of the young woman on my other hand who wore her gold watch
+outside her dress, and who turned to the elderly stranger for sympathy
+in a certain supreme moment? This was when the crowd below crumpled
+suddenly together like the crushing of paper and the sense of something
+tragically mysterious in the distance clarified itself as the death of
+one of the horses. It had dropped from heart-break in its tracks, as if
+shot, and presently a string of young men and boys came dragging to some
+_spoliarium_ the long, slender body of the pretty creature over the turf
+which its hoofs had beaten a moment before. Then it was that the girl,
+with the watch on her breast, turned and asked, "Isn't it sad?"
+
+[Illustration: FINCHALE PRIORY]
+
+
+IV
+
+She was probably not the daughter of a hundred earls, but there must
+have been some such far-descended fair among the ladies who showed
+themselves from time to time in the royal paddock across a little space
+from our Grand Stand. The enclosure has no doubt a more technical
+name, which I would call it by if I knew it, for I do not wish to be
+irreverent; but paddock is very sporty, and it must serve my occasion.
+The King never showed himself there at all, though much craned round for
+and eagerly expected. But ladies and gentlemen moved about in the close,
+and stood and talked together; very tall people, very easily straight
+and well set up, very handsome, and very amiable-looking; they may have
+been really kind and good, or they may have looked so to please the
+King and keep his spirits up. I did not then, but I do now, realize that
+these were courtiers, such as one has always read of, and were of very
+historical quality in their attendance on the monarch. I trust it will
+not take from the dignity of the fact if I note that several of the
+courtiers wore derby hats, and one was in a sack coat and a topper. I
+am not sure what the fairer reader will think if I tell that one of the
+ladies had on a dress with a white body and crimson skirt and sleeves,
+and a vast black picture-hat, and wore it with a charming air of
+authority.
+
+The weather, in the excitement of the races, had not known whether it
+was raining or not, but we feared its absent-mindedness, and at the end
+of the third race we went away. It is not well to trust an English day
+too far; this had begun with brilliant sunshine, but it dimmed as it
+wore on, and we could not know that it was keeping for us the surprise
+of a very refined sunset. My memory does not serve as to just how we had
+got out to the race-ground; I think, from our being set down at the very
+gate, that it was by hansom or by fly; but now we promised ourselves to
+walk back to town. We did not actually do so; we went back most of the
+way by tram; but we were the firmer about walking at the outset, because
+we presently found ourselves in a lane of gypsy tents, where there was
+an alluring sight and smell of frying fish and potatoes. In the midst of
+the refection, you could have your fortune told, very favorably, for a
+very little money. All up and down this happy avenue there went girls of
+several dozen sizes and ages, crying a particular kind of taffy, proper
+to the day and place, and never to be had on any other day in any other
+place.
+
+We had an hour before train-time, and we thought we would go and see
+the Parish Church of Doncaster, which we had read was worth seeing.
+Our belief was confirmed by a group of disappointed ladies in the
+churchyard, who said it was a most beautiful church inside, but that
+they had not seen it because it was shut. We proved the fact by trying
+the door, and then we came away consoling ourselves with the scoff that
+it was probably closed for the races. At the bookseller's, where we
+stopped to buy some photographs of the interior of the church we had not
+seen, we lamented our disappointment, and the salesman said, "Perhaps
+it was closed for the races." So our joke seemed to turn earnest, and on
+reflection it did not surprise us in that England of close-knit unities
+where people and prince are of one texture in their pleasures and
+devotions, and the Church is hardly more national than the Turf.
+
+
+V
+
+At Durham, which was my next excursion from York, I cannot claim,
+therefore, that my mission was more serious because it almost solely
+concerned the Church, or that it was more frivolous at Doncaster, where
+it almost solely concerned the Turf. My train started in a fine mist
+that turned to sun, but not before it had shown me with the local color,
+which a gray light lends everything, a pack of hounds crossing a field
+near the track with two huntsmen at their heels. They were not chasing,
+but running leisurely, and with their flower-like, loose spread over the
+green, and the pink-coated hunters on their brown mounts, they afforded
+a picture as vivid and of as perfect semblance to all my visions of
+fox-hunting as I could have asked. I had been hoping that I might see
+something of the famous sport, almost as English as the Church or the
+Turf, and there, suddenly and all unexpectedly, the sight fully and
+satisfyingly was. Now, indeed, I felt that my impression of English
+society was complete, and that I might go home and write novels of
+English high life, and do something to redeem myself a little from the
+disgrace I had fallen into with my fellow-plebeians by always writing
+of common Americans, like themselves, and never _grandes dames_ or ideal
+persons, or people in the best society.
+
+But I did not want to go home at once, or turn back from going to Durham
+through that pleasant landscape, where the mist hung between the trees
+which seemed themselves only heavier bulks of mist. The wheat in some
+of the fields was still uncut, and in others, where it had been gathered
+into sheaves, the rooks by hundreds were noisily gleaning in the track
+of the reapers. From this conventionally English keeping, I passed
+suddenly to the sight of the gaunt, dry, gravelly bed of a wide river,
+such as I had known in Central Italy, or the Middle West at home; and I
+realized once again that England is no island of one simple complexion,
+but is a condensed continent, with all continental varieties of feature
+in it. You must cover thousands and thousands of miles in our tedious
+lengths and breadths for the beauties and sublimities of scenery which
+you shall gather from fewer hundreds in England; I have no doubt they
+have even volcanoes there, but I did not see any, probably because the
+English are so reticent, and hate to make a display of any sort.
+
+
+VI
+
+It is because they are so, or possibly because of my ignorance, that I
+did not know or at all imagine how magnificent the Cathedral of Durham
+is, or what a matchless seat it has on the bluffs of the river, with
+depths of woods below its front, tossing in the rich chill of the
+September wind. As it takes flight for the heavens, to which its
+business is to invite the thought, it seems to carry the earth with it,
+for if you climb those noble heights, you find your feet still on the
+ground, in a most stately space of open level between the cathedral and
+its neighbor castle, which alone could be worthy of its high company.
+
+The castle is Tudor, but the cathedral is beyond all other English
+cathedrals, I believe, Norman, though to the naked eye it looks so
+Gothic, and probably is. Here I will leave the reader with any pictures
+or memories of it which he happens to have, for I have always held it
+a sin to try describing architecture, or if not a sin, a bore. What
+chiefly remains to me of my impression of Durham Cathedral is,
+strangely enough, an objection: I did not like those decorated pillars,
+alternating with the clustered columns of the interior, and I do not
+suppose I ever shall: the spiral furrows, the zigzag and lozenge figures
+chiselled in their surfaces, weakened them to the eye and seemed to
+trifle with their proud bulk.
+
+But to the castle of Durham I have no objection whatever. I should like
+to live in it, as I should in all other Tudor houses, great or small,
+that I saw, where, as I am constantly saying, a high ideal of comfort
+is realized. It is almost as nobly placed as the cathedral, and it is
+approached by a very stately courtyard, of like spacious effect with the
+cathedral piazza. Inside it there is a kitchen of the sixteenth century,
+with a company of neat serving-maids, too comely and young to be,
+perhaps, of the same period, that gives the tourist a high sense of the
+luxury in which the Bishop of Durham and the Judges of the Assize Courts
+live when they are residents in the castle. One sees their apartments,
+dim and rich, and darkly furnished, but not gloomily, both where they
+sleep and where they eat, and flatteringly envies them in a willingness
+for the moment to be a judge or a bishop for the sake of such a fit
+setting. There is also a fine crypt, with a fine dining-hall and a black
+staircase of ancient oak, and a gallery with classic busts, and other
+pictures worthy of wonder, let alone a history from the time of William
+the Conqueror, who first fancied a castle where it stands, down to the
+present day. The memory of such successive guests as the Empress Matilda
+and Henry II. her son, King John, Henry III., Edwards I., II., and III.,
+Queen Philippa, Henry VI., and James I., and Charles I., and Edward
+VII., abides in the guidebook, and may be summoned from its page to
+the chambers of the beautiful old place by any traveller intending
+impressions for literary use from a medieval environment in perfect
+repair.
+
+
+VII
+
+One must be hard to satisfy if one is not satisfied with Durham Castle,
+and its interior contented me as fully as the exterior of the Cathedral.
+I went a walk, after leaving the castle, for a further feast of the
+Cathedral from the paths along the shelving banks of the beautiful
+Weare. There, at a certain point, I met a studious-looking gentleman who
+I am sure must have been a professor of Durham University hard by; and
+I asked him, with due entreaty for pardon, "What river was that." He
+quelled the surprise he must have felt at my ignorance and answered
+gently, "The Weare." "Ah, to be sure! The Weare," I said, and thanked
+him, and longed for more talk with him, but felt myself so unworthy that
+I had not the face to prompt him further. He passed, and then I met a
+man much more of my own kind, if not probably so little informed. That
+rich, chill gale was still tossing and buffeting the tree tops, and he
+made occasion of this to say, "This is a cold wynd a-blowin', Mister."
+"It is, rather," I assented. "I was think-in'," he observed from an
+apparent generalization, "that I wished I was at home." Then he suddenly
+added, "Help a poor man!" I was not wholly surprised at the climax,
+and I offered him, provisionally, a penny. "Will that do?" He hesitated
+perceptibly; then he allowed, with a subtle reluctance, "Yes, that'll
+do," and so passed on to satisfy, I hope, the wish he thought he had.
+
+[Illustration: DURHAM CATHEDRAL--ITS MATCHLESS SEAT ON THE BLUFFS OF THE
+RIVER]
+
+I pursued my own course, as far as the bridge which spans the Weare near
+a most picturesque mill, and then I stopped a kindly-looking workman
+and asked him whether he thought I could find a fly or cab anywhere near
+that would take me into the town. He answered, briefly but consistently
+with his looks, "Ah doot," and as he owned that it was a long way to
+town, I let his doubt decide me to go back to the station.
+
+I felt that I ought to have driven from there into the town, and seen
+it, and taken to York a later train than the one I had in mind. In the
+depravity induced by my neglect of this plain duty, I went, with my
+third class return ticket conscious in my pocket, into the first class
+refreshment room, and had tea there, as if I had been gentry at the very
+least, and possibly nobility. Then, having a good deal of time still
+on my hands, I loitered over the book-stall of the station, and stole a
+passage of conversation with a kindly clergyman whom I found looking at
+the pretty shilling editions filling the cases. I said, How nice it was
+to have Hazlitt in that green cloth; and he said, Yes, but he held for
+Gibbon in leather; and just then his train came in and he ran off to
+it, and left me to my guilt in not having gone to see Durham. It was now
+twilight, and too late; but there the charming old town still is, and
+will long remain, I hope, with its many memories of war and peace, for
+whoever will visit it. Certainly there had been no lack of adventures in
+my ample hour. It was as charming to weave my conjectures, about the
+two gentlemen with whom I had so barely spoken, as to have carried
+my acquaintance with them further, and I cannot see how it would have
+profited me to know more even of that fellow-man who, in the cold wynd
+a-blowing, had just been thinking he wished he was at home.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS
+
+
+It was fit that on our way to Boston we should pause in passing through
+Cambridge. That was quite as we should have done at home, and I can only
+wish now that we had paused longer, though every moment that kept us
+from Boston, if it had been anywhere but in England, would have been a
+loss. There, it was all gain, and all joy, the gay September 24th
+that we went this divine journey. My companion was that companionable
+archaeologist who had guided my steps in search of the American origins
+in London, and who was now to help me follow the Pilgrim Fathers over
+the ground where they sojourned when they were only the Pilgrim Sons.
+At divers places on the way, after we left London, he pointed out some
+scene associated with American saints or heroes. We traversed the region
+that George William Curtis' people came from, hard by Roxburgh, and
+Eliot's, the Apostle to the Indians; again we skirted the Ralph Waldo
+Emerson country, with its big market town of Bishop's Stortford; and
+beyond Ely, where we stopped for the Cathedral and a luncheon, not
+unworthy of it, at the station, he startled me from a pleasant drowse I
+had fallen into in our railway carriage, with the cry: "There! That is
+where Captain John Smith was born." "Where? Where?" I implored too late,
+looking round the compartment everywhere. "Back where those chickens
+were."
+
+
+I
+
+That was the nearest I came to seeing one of the most famous Virginian
+origins. But you cannot see everything in England; there are too many
+things; and if the truth must be known I cared more for the natural
+features than the historical facts of the landscape. The country was
+flat, and a raw green, as it should be in that raw air, under that
+dun sky, with sheep hardily biting the short tough pasturage under the
+imbrowning oaks and elms, and the olive-graying willows, beside the
+full, still streams scarce wetter than the ground they dreamed through.
+
+We did not reach Boston until six o'clock, when the day was already
+waning, and the Stump of St. Botolph's Church stood dim against the sky.
+It was a long drive through the suburban streets from the station to the
+hotel, which we found full, and which with its crazy floors touched the
+fancy as full of something besides guests. But it was well for us so,
+because across the market-place, which forms the chief public square
+of Boston, was a far better hotel, where we were welcomed to the
+old-fashioned ideal of the English inn, such as I did not so nearly
+realize anywhere else. The ideal was a little impaired by the electric
+light in our bedrooms, but it was not a very brilliant electric light,
+and there was a damp cold in the corridors which allowed no doubt of its
+genuineness. In the dining-room, which was also the reading-room, there
+was an admirable image of a fire in the grate, and a prevailing warmth
+and brightness which cheered the heart of exile. When we presently had
+dinner, specialized for us by certain differences from that of two other
+travellers, there seemed nothing more to ask, except the conversation of
+our companions, and this we duly had, quite as if we were four wayfarers
+met there in a book. One of these gentlemen proved a solicitor from
+Bath, and that made me feel more at home, knowing and loving Bath as I
+did. It did not matter that in trying for some mutual acquaintance
+there we failed; our good-will was everything; and the solicitor was
+intelligent and agreeable. The other gentleman, tall, dark, of urbane
+stateliness, was something more, in the touch of Oriental suavity
+which, more than his nose, betrayed him; and it appeared, in delightful
+suggestion of the old-time commercial intimacy of the Dutch and English
+coasts, that he was from Holland, and next morning at breakfast he
+developed a large valise, which I now think held samples. If he was a
+Dutch Jew, he was probably a Spanish Jew by descent, and what will the
+difficult reader have more, in the materials for his romance? Did we
+gather about the grate after we had done dinner, and each tell the
+story of his life, or at least the most remarkable thing that had ever
+happened to him?
+
+[Illustration: THE "STUMP" OF ST. BOTOLPH'S CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY]
+
+I cannot say, but I remember that my friend and I, in my instant hunger
+for Boston, which was greater than my hunger for dinner, set forth while
+the meal was preparing, and visited the Church of St. Botolph. To reach
+it we had to pass through the greater length of the market-place, one
+of the most picturesque in England, and the worthy ancestress of
+Faneuil Hall and Quincy market-places, which are the most picturesque in
+America. At one side of its triangle is the birthplace and dwelling
+of Jean Ingelow, and at the point nearest the church is the statue of
+Herbert Ingram, the less famous but more locally recognized Bostonian,
+who founded the _Illustrated London News_ with the money he made by the
+invention and sale of Old Parr's Pills. He was thrice sent to Parliament
+from his native town, and he related it to America, after two centuries,
+by drowning in Lake Michigan. "R. N.," the otherwise anonymous author of
+a very intelligent and agreeable _Handbook of Boston_, relates that in
+his first canvass for Parliament Ingram was opposed by a gentleman who,
+when he asked the voices of the voters, after the old English fashion,
+was told by four of them in succession that they were promised "to their
+cousin Ingram," and who thereupon declared that if he had known Ingram
+"was cousin to the whole town" he would, never have stood against him.
+Like the Bostonians of Massachusetts, the Bostonians of Lincolnshire
+were in fact closely knit together by ties of kinship, owing, "R. N."
+believes, to the isolation of Boston before the draining of its fens,
+and not to their conviction that there were no outsiders worthy to mate
+with them.
+
+
+II
+
+The house where the martyrologist John Fox first saw the light was
+replaced long ago by a famous old inn, pulled down in its turn; but the
+many and many Americans who visit Boston may still visit the house where
+Jean Ingelow was born. Whether they may see more than the outside of it
+I do not know from experiment or even inquiry. "R. N." will say nothing
+of her but that she was born, and that her father was a banker; perhaps
+he thinks that she has spoken sufficiently for herself.
+
+[Illustration: THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND QUINCY
+MARKET-PLACES]
+
+The air of the market-place, as we crossed to the church, was of a
+pleasant bleakness, and the Witham was coldly washing under the wall
+which keeps St. Botolph from it. In the dimness we could have only a
+conjecture of the church's outward beauty, and of the grandeur of the
+tower climbing into the evening, where it has hailed so many myriads
+of moving ships, and beckoned them to safety. But within, where it was
+already night, the church was cheerfully luminous with Welsbach lights,
+which showed it all wreathed and garlanded for a harvest festival,
+began the day before, and to be concluded now with some fit religious
+observance. The blossoms and leaves were a little wilted and withered,
+but the fruits and vegetables were there in sturdy endurance, and
+together they swathed the pulpit from which John Cotton used to preach,
+and all but hid its structure from view, like flowers of rhetoric
+softening some hard doctrine.
+
+Apparently, however, Cotton's doctrine was not anywise too hard, or
+even hard enough, for such "a factious people, who were imbued with the
+Puritan spirit," as he found in Boston, when he was first elected vicar
+of St. Botolph's; and it was not till Archbishop Laud's ecclesiastical
+tyrannies began that he came to see "the Sin of Conformity" and to
+preach resistance. His conflict with the authorities went so far that
+exile to another Boston in another hemisphere became his only hope.
+Or, as Lord Dorset intimated, "if he had been guilty of drunkenness,
+uncleanness, or any lesser fault, he could have obtained his pardon,
+but as he was guilty of Puritanism, and Non-conformity, the crime was
+non-pardonable; and therefore he advised him to flee for his safety."
+
+The Cotton Chapel, so called, was restored mainly with moneys received
+from Cotton's posterity, lineal or lateral, in his city of refuge
+overseas, and "the corbels that support the timbered ceiling are carved
+with the arms of certain of the early colonists of New England." Edward
+Everett, one of Cotton's descendants, wrote the dedicatory inscription
+in Latin, which "R. N." has Englished in verse, and I am the more
+scrupulous to quote it, because, as I must own with my usual reluctant
+honesty, I quite missed seeing the Cotton Chapel.
+
+     That here John Cotton's memory may survive
+     Where for so long he labored when alive,
+     In James' reign and Charles', ere it ceased--
+     A grave, skilled, learned, earnest parish-priest;
+     Till from the strife that tossed the Church of God
+     He in a new world sought a new abode,
+     To a new England, a new Boston came,
+     (That took, to honor him, that reverend name)
+     Fed the first flock of Christ that gathered there--
+     Till death deprived it of its shepherd's care--
+     There well resolved all doubts of mind perplext,
+     Whether with cares of this world or the next;
+     Two centuries five lustra from the year
+     That saw the exile leave his labors here,
+     His family, his townsmen, with delight--
+     (Whom to the task their English kin invite)--
+     To the fair fane he served so well of yore,
+     His name, in two worlds honored, thus restore,
+     This chapel renovate, this tablet place,
+     In this, the year of man's recovered Grace,
+                         1855.
+
+
+III
+
+I missed most of the other memorable things in the church that night,
+but I saw fleetingly some of the beautiful tombs for which it is famous;
+the effigies of the dead lay in their niches, quietly, as if already
+tucked away for the night, in the secular sleep of the dust beneath. The
+tombs were more famous than they, and more beautiful, if the faces of
+some were true likenesses, but after so many centuries one ought not to
+require even women to be pretty.
+
+[Illustration: THE RIVER AT EVENING]
+
+We had not begun to have enough of Boston yet, and after dinner we went
+a long walk up the Witham, away from the parapet before the church,
+under which its deep tides are always washing to and fro. In the
+dimness, after we had got a little to the outskirts of the town, there
+seemed shipyards along the river's course, but at one place there was
+a large building brilliantly lighted, which from certain effects at the
+windows we decided to be a printing-office on the scale of those in and
+near our own Boston. What was our shame and grief the next morning
+to find it was a cigar factory, and to learn that cigar and cigarette
+making was almost the chief industry of the mother Boston. There are
+really two large tobacco factories there running overtime, and always
+advertising for more women and girls to do their work; and in our
+Boston, not so long ago, smoking in the street was forbidden! Such are
+the ironies of life.
+
+What the shipyards had turned into by daylight, I do not now remember.
+The Witham had turned into a long, deep gash, cut down into the clay
+twenty feet from the level of the flood tides. We crossed on a penny
+ferry which the current pushed over in the manner of the earliest
+ferries, near the tobacco factory, and came back into the heart of the
+town through streets of low stone houses, with few buildings of note to
+dignify their course. Small craft lay along the steep muddy shores, and
+at one place a little excursion steamer was waiting for the tide to
+come in and float it for the fulfilment of its promise of sailing at ten
+o'clock. We idly longed to make its voyage with it, and if the chance
+were offering now, I certainly should not forego it as I did then. But
+when you are in a foreign place, no matter how much you have travelled
+and how well you know that it will not offer soon again, you reject the
+most smiling chance because you think you can take it any time.
+
+The morning was soft and warm, with a sun shining amiably on the rather
+commonplace old town. I had risen betimes that I might go and get
+a Spanish melon for my breakfast, but at eight o'clock I found the
+fruiterer's locked and barred against me. I lingered and hungered for
+the melons which I saw in his window, and then I tried other fruiterers,
+but none of them was stirring yet. I reflected how different it would
+have been in our own Boston; and if it had not been for the market
+people coming into the square and beginning to dress their stalls with
+vegetables, and fish, and native fruits, such as hard pears and knotty
+apples, I do not know how ill I might have come away thinking of that
+idle mother Boston. In other squares there were cattle for sale later,
+and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the
+markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place
+found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping
+with the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which,
+once for all, I must own was not an impressive place.
+
+The best thing in it, and the thing you are always coming back to,
+is the beautiful church, to which we paid a second visit early in the
+forenoon. We found it where we left it the night before, lifting its
+tower from the brink of the Witham, and looking far out over the flat
+land to a sea no flatter. The land seems indeed, like so much English
+coast, merely the sea come ashore, and turned into fens for the greater
+convenience of the fishermen, whom, with the deeper sea sailors, we
+saw about the town, lounging through the crooked streets, and hanging
+bare-armed upon the parapets of the bridges. Now we found the church
+had about its foot a population of Bostonians for whom, under their flat
+gravestones, it had been chiming the quarters from its mellow-throated
+bells, while the Bostonians on our side had been hustling for liberty,
+and money, and culture, and all the good things of this world, and
+getting them in a measure that would astonish their namesakes. Within
+the church we saw again the beautiful tombs of the night before, and
+others like them, and again we saw the pulpit of John Cotton, which we
+could make out a little better than at first, because its garlands were
+a little more withered and shrunken away. But better than either we
+realized the perfection of the church interior as a whole, so ample, so
+simple, such a comfortable and just sufficient eyeful.
+
+
+IV
+
+From other interests in St. Botolph's you somehow keep always, or
+finally, coming to the Stump, as the tower is called somewhat in the
+humor of our Boston. It is not so fair within as without; that could
+not be in the nature of things; and yet the interior of the tower has a
+claim upon the spectator's wonder, if not his admiration, which, so far
+as I know, the interior of no other tower has. It is all treated as a
+loftier room of the church, and its ceiling, a hundred and fifty feet
+from the ground, is elaborately and allegorically groined. The work was
+done when the whole church was restored about half a century ago, and
+has not the claim of medieval whim upon the fancy. Not so much pleasure
+as he might wish mingles with the marvel of the beholder, who carries a
+crick in the neck away from the sight, and yet once, but not more, in a
+way, it is worth while to have had the sight. Certainly this treatment
+of the tower is unique; there is nothing to compare with it in Boston,
+Massachusetts, and cannot be even when the interior of the Old South is
+groined.
+
+When we came out of the church, we found the weather amusing itself
+as usual in England, raining with wind, then blowing without rain, and
+presently, but by no means decisively, sunning without either wind or
+rain. The conditions were favorable to a further exploration of the
+town, which seemed to have a passion for old cannon, and for sticking
+them about in all sorts of odd nooks and corners. We found one smaller
+piece over a gateway, which we were forbidden by a sign-board to enter
+on pain of prosecution for trespassing. There was nothing else to
+prevent our entering, and we went in, to find ourselves in an alley with
+nothing but a Gypsy van in it. Nothing but a Gypsy van! As if that were
+not the potentiality of all manner of wild romance! Whether the alley
+belonged to Gypsies, or the Gypsies had trespassed by leaving their van
+in it, I shall now probably never know, but I commend the inquiry to any
+reader of mine whom these pages shall inspire to repeat our pilgrimage.
+
+[Illustration: LIFTING ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM]
+
+There was no great token of genteel life in Boston, so far as we saw it,
+but perhaps we did not look in the right places. There were good shops,
+but not fine or large ones, and I am able to report of the intellectual
+status that there are three weekly newspapers, but no dailies, which
+could not be the case in any American town of fourteen thousand people.
+Concerning society, I can only say that in our wanderings we came at one
+point on a vast, high-walled, iron-gated garden, which looked as if it
+might have society beyond it, but not being positively forbidden we did
+not penetrate it. We did indeed visit the ancient grammar-school, one
+of those foundations which in England were meant originally for the poor
+deserving of scholarship, but which have nearly all lapsed to the more
+deserving rich, careful of the contamination of the lower classes.
+Being out of term the school was closed to its pupils, but we found
+a contractor there removing the old stoves and putting in a system of
+hot-water heating, which he said was better fitted to resist the cold
+of the Boston winters. He was not a very conversable man, but so much we
+screwed out of him, with the added fact that the tuition of that school
+was no longer free. It came to some five guineas a year, no great sum,
+but perhaps sufficient to keep the school, with the other influences,
+select enough for the patronage to which it had fallen. It was a
+pleasant place, with a playground before it, which in the course of
+generations there must have been a good deal of schoolboy fun got out
+of.
+
+
+V
+
+There remained for us now only the Guildhall to visit, and we had left
+that to the last because it was the thing that had mostly brought us
+to Boston. It was the scene of the trial and imprisonment of those poor
+people of the region roundabout who were trying to escape from their
+"dread lord," James the First, and were arrested for this crime, and
+brought to answer for it before the magistrates of the town. Their dread
+lord had then lately met some ministers of their faith at Hampton Court,
+and there browbeaten, if not beaten, them in argument, so that he was in
+no humor to let, these people, who afterward became the Pilgrim Fathers,
+get away to Holland, where there was no dread lord, or at least none of
+King James' thinking.
+
+But no words can be so good to tell of all this as the words of Governor
+Bradford in his _Historie of Plymouth Plantation_, where he says that
+"ther was a large companie of them purposed to get passage at Boston in
+Lincolnshire, and for that end had hired a shipe wholy to them selves, &
+made agreement with the maister to be ready at a certaine day, and take
+them and their goods in, at a conveniente place, wher they accordingly
+would all attende in readiness. So after long waiting, & large expences,
+though he kepte not day with them, yet he came at length & tooke them
+in, in the night. But when he had them & their goods abord, he betrayed
+them, haveing before hand complotted with the serchers & other officers
+so to doe; who tooke them, and put them into open boats, & ther rifled
+and ransaked them, searching them to their shirts for money, yea even
+the women furder then became modestie; and then caried them back into
+the towne, & made them a spectakle & wonder to the multitude, which
+came flocking on all sides to behould them. Being thus first, by the
+catchpoule officer, rifled, & stripte of their money, books, and much
+other goods, they were presented to the magistrates, and messengers
+sente to informe the lords of the Counsell of them; and so they were
+comited to ward. Indeed the magistrats used them courteously, and shewed
+them what favour they could; but could not deliver them till order
+came from the Counsell-table. But the issue was that after a months
+imprisonmente, the greatest parte were dismiste, & sent to the places
+from whence they came; but 7. of the principall were still kept in
+prison, and bound over to the Assises."
+
+My excellent "R. N." of the _Handbook of Boston_ is anxious to have his
+reader, as I in turn am anxious to have mine, distinguish between these
+future Pilgrim Fathers and the gentlemen and scholars who later founded
+Boston in Massachusetts Bay, and called its name after that of the town
+they had dwelt in or often visited before they left the handsome keeping
+of the gentler life of Lincolnshire. Such were Richard Bellingham,
+Edmund Quincy, Thomas Leverett, John Cotton, Samuel Whiting, and
+others, known to our colonial and national history. Not even Bradford
+or Brewster, afterward dignified figures in Plymouth colony, were of the
+humble band, men, women, and children, that the officers of Boston took
+from their vessel. "Pathetic but splendid figures," my brave "R. N."
+calls them, and he tells how, after a month's jail, they were "sent home
+broken men, to endure the scoffs of their neighbors and the rigors of
+ecclesiastical discipline."
+
+
+VI
+
+The dungeons which remain to witness of their hardships in Boston are of
+thick-walled, iron-grated stone, and the captives were fed on bread
+and water within smell of the roasting and broiling of the Guildhall
+kitchens immediately beside them. I will not conjecture with "R. N."
+that they were put there "by a refinement of cruelty," so that they
+might suffer the more in that vicinage. "The magistrates" who had "used
+them courteously and shewed them what favour they could," would not have
+willed that; but perhaps "the Counsell-table" did; and it was certainly
+a hardship that the dungeons and the kitchens were so close together, as
+any man may see at this day. Neither the dungeons nor the kitchens are
+any longer used; the spits and grates are rusted where the fires blazed,
+and the cells where the Pilgrims suffered are now full of large earthen
+jars. For no other or better reason, the large open spaces of the
+basement outside of them were scattered about with agricultural
+implements, ploughs, harrows, and the like. It was the belief of my
+companion, founded on I know not what fact, that the hall in which the
+Pilgrims were tried was a large upper chamber which we found occupied by
+a boys' school. The door stood partly ajar, and we could see the master
+within walking up and down before some twenty boys, as if waiting for
+one of them to answer some question he had put them. Perhaps it was a
+question of local history, for none of them seemed able to answer it;
+presently when a boy came out on some errand, and we stopped him, and
+asked him where it was the Pilgrims had been tried, he did not know,
+and apparently he had never heard of the Pilgrims. He was a very
+nice-looking boy, and otherwise not unintelligent; certainly he was
+well-mannered, as nice-looking English boys are apt to be with their
+elders; perhaps he had heard too much of the Pilgrims, and had purposely
+forgotten them. This might very well have happened in a place like
+Boston where such hordes of Americans are coming every year, and asking
+so many hard questions concerning an incident of local history not
+wholly creditable to the place. He could justly have said that the same
+or worse might have happened to the Pilgrims anywhere else in England,
+under the dread lord there then was, and in fact something of the same
+hardship did befall them afterward at the place a little northeast of
+Boston, which we were now to visit for their piteous sake.
+
+"The nexte spring after," as Bradford continues the narrative of their
+sorrows, "ther was another attempte made by some of these & others, to
+get over at an other place. And so it fell out, that they light of a
+Dutchman at Hull, having a ship of his owne belonging to Zealand; they
+made agreements with him, and acquainted him with their condition,
+hoping to find more faithfullnes in him, then in the former of their
+owne nation. He bad them not fear, for he would doe well enough. He
+was by appointment to take them in betweene Grimsbe & Hull, where was
+a large comone a good way distante from any towne. Now against the
+prefixed time, the women & children, with the goods, were sent to the
+place in a small barke, which they had hired for that end; and the men
+were to meete them by land. But it so fell out, that they were ther a
+day before the shipe came, and the sea being rough, and the women very
+sicke, prevailed with the seamen to put into a creeke hardby, wher they
+lay on ground at lowwater. The nexte morning the shipe came, but they
+were fast, & could not stir till about noone. In the mean time, the
+shipe maister, perceiveing how the matter was, sente his boate to be
+getting the men abord whom he saw ready, walking aboute the shore. But
+after the first boat full was gott abord, & she was ready to goe for
+more, the Mr. espied a greate company, both horse & foote, with bills,
+& gunes, & other weapons; for the countrie was raised to take them. The
+Dutchman seeing this swore his countries oath, 'sacremente,' and having
+the wind faire, waiged his Ancor, hoysed sayles, & away. But the poore
+men which were gott abord, were in great distress for their wives and
+children, which they saw thus to be taken, and were left destitute of
+their helps; and them selves also, not having a cloath to shifte them
+with, more then they had on their baks, & some scarce a peney aboute
+them, all they had being abord the barke. It drew tears from their
+eyes, and any thing they had they would have given to have been a shore
+againe; but all in vaine, ther was no remedy, they must thus sadly part.
+The rest of the men there were in greatest danger, made shift to escape
+away before the troope could surprise them: those only staying that best
+might, to be assistante unto the women. But pitifull it was to see the
+heavie case of these poore women in this distress: what weeping & crying
+on every side, some for their husbands, that were carried away in the
+ship as is before related; others not knowing what should become of
+them, & their little ones; others again melted in teares, seeing their
+poore little ones hanging aboute them, crying for feare, and quaking
+with could. Being thus aprehanded, they hurried from one place to
+another, and from one justice to another, till in the ende they knew not
+what to doe with them; for to imprison so many women & innocent children
+for no other cause (many of them) but that they must goo with their
+husbands, seemed to be unreasonable and all would crie out of them;
+and to send them home againe was as difficult, for they aleged, as the
+trueth was, they had no homes to goe to, for they had either sould, or
+otherwise disposed of their houses & livings. To be shorte, after they
+had been thus turmoyled a good while, and conveyed from one constable to
+another, they were glad to be ridd of them in the end upon any termes:
+for all were wearied & tired with them. Though in the mean time they
+(poore soules) indured miserie enough; and thus in the end necessitie
+forste a way for them."
+
+
+VII
+
+If there is any more touching incident in the history of man's
+inhumanity to man, I do not know it, or cannot now recall it; and it was
+to visit the scene of it near "Grimsbe," or Great Grimsby, as it is now
+called, that we set out, after viewing their prison in Boston, over wide
+plains, with flights of windmills alighted on them everywhere. Here and
+there one seemed to have had its wings clipped, and we were told by a
+brighter young fellow than we often had for a travelling companion
+that this was because steam had been put into it as a motive power more
+constant than wind, even on that wind-swept coast. There seems to have
+been nothing else, so far as my note-book witnesses, to take up our
+thoughts in the short run to Great Grimsby, and for all I know now I
+may have drowsed by many chicken-yards marking the birthplace of our
+discoverers and founders. We got to Great Grimsby in time for a very
+lamentable lunch in a hostelry near the station, kept, I think, for such
+"poore people" as the Pilgrims were, with stomachs not easily turned by
+smeary marble table-tops with a smeary maid having to take their orders,
+and her ineffective napkin in her hand. The honesty as well as the
+poverty of the place was attested, when, returning to recover a
+forgotten umbrella, we were met at the door by this good girl, who had
+left her bar to fetch it in anticipation of all question.
+
+At Great Grimsby, it seemed, there was no vehicle but a very exceptional
+kind of cab,--looking like a herdic turned wrongside fore, and unable
+to orient itself aright,--available for the long drive to that "large
+comone a good way distante from any towne," which we were to make, if
+we wished to visit the scene of the Pilgrims' sufferings in their second
+attempt to escape from their dread lord. In this strange equipage,
+therefore, we set out, and nine long miles we drove through a country
+which seemed to rise with increasing surprise at us and our turnout on
+each inquiry we made for the way from chance passers. Just beyond the
+suburbs of the town we entered the region of a vast, evil smell which
+we verified as that of the decaying fish spread upon the fields, for
+a fertilizer after they had missed their market in that great fishing
+centre. Otherwise the landscape was much the ordinary English landscape
+of the flatter parts, but wilder and rougher than in the south or west,
+and constantly growing more so as we drove on and on. Our cabman kept
+a good courage, as long as the highway showed signs of much travel,
+but when it began to falter away into a country road, he must have
+lost faith in our sanity, though he kept an effect of the conventional
+respect for his nominal betters which English cabmen never part with
+except in a dispute about fares and distances. We stayed him as well
+as we could with some grapes and pears, which we found we did not
+want after our lunch, and which we handed him up through his little
+trap-door, but a plaintive quaver grew into his voice, and he let his
+horse lag in the misgiving which it probably shared with him. Nothing
+of signal interest occurred in our progress except at one point, near
+a Methodist chapel, where we caught sight of a gayly painted blue van,
+lettered over with many texts and mottoes, which my friend explained
+as one of the vans intinerantly used by extreme Protestants of the Anne
+Askew persuasion to prevent the spread of Romanism in England.
+
+The signs of travel had not only ceased, but a little in front of us the
+way was barred by a gate, and beyond this gate there was nothing but a
+sort of savage pasture, with many red and brown cattle in it, gathered
+questioningly about the barrier, or lifting their heads indifferently
+from the grass. Just before we reached the gate we passed a peasant's
+cottage, where he was sociably getting in his winter's coal, and he and
+his wife and children, and the carter, all leaned upon whatever supports
+they found next them, and stared at the extraordinary apparition of two,
+I hope, personable strangers driving in a hansom of extreme type into a
+cow pasture. But we were not going to give ourselves away to their too
+probable ignorance by asking if that were the place where the Pilgrims
+who founded New England were first stopped from going to Holland.
+
+My friend dismounted, and opened the gate, and we drove in among the
+cattle, and after they had satisfied a peaceful curiosity concerning us,
+they went about their business of eating grass, and we strayed over "the
+large comone," and tried to imagine its looks nearly three hundred years
+before. They could not have been very different; the place could hardly
+have been much wilder, and there was the "creeke hardby wher they lay,"
+the hapless women and children, in their boat "at lowwater," while the
+evening came on, no doubt, just as it was doing with us, the weather
+clearing, and the sunset glassy and cold. Off yonder, away across the
+solitary moor, was the course of the Humber, marked for us by the trail
+of a steamer's smoke through the fringes of trees, and for them by the
+sail of the Dutchman, who, when he saw next day that "great company,
+both horse and foote, with bills and gunes, and other weapons," coming
+to harry those poor people, "swore his countries oath, 'sacremente,'
+and having the wind faire, waiged his ancor, hoysed sails, and away,"
+leaving those desolate women and their little ones lamenting.
+
+
+VIII
+
+On our way back we stopped at a little country church, so peaceful, so
+very peaceful, in the evening light, where it stood, withdrawn from the
+highway, Norman and Gothic without, and within all so sweet and bare
+and clean, that we could not believe in the old ecclesiasticism
+which persecuted the Puritans into the exile whither they carried the
+persecuting spirit with them. A pretty child, a little girl, opened the
+churchyard gate and held it for us to pass, and her gentleness made me
+the more question the history of those dreadful days in the past. When I
+saw a young lady, in the modern dress which I had so often lost my heart
+to at the Church Parade in Hyde Park, going up a leafy lane, toward the
+vicarage, from having been for tennis and afternoon tea at some pleasant
+home in the neighborhood, I denied the atrocious facts altogether. She
+had such a very charming hat on.
+
+The suburbs of Great Grimsby, after you reach them through that zone of
+bad smell, are rather attractive, and you get into long clean streets of
+small stone houses, like those of Plymouth or Southampton, and presently
+you reach the Humber, which is full of the steamers and sail, both
+fishing and deep sea, of the prosperous port, with great booms of
+sawlogs from Norway, half filling the channel, and with a fringe of tall
+chimneys from the sawmills along the shores. Great Grimsby is not only
+the centre of a vast distributing trade in coal and lumber, but of a
+still vaster trade in fish. It cuts one's pride, if one has believed
+that Gloucester, Massachusetts, is the greatest fishing port in the
+world, to learn that Grimsby, with a hundred more fishing sail, is only
+"_one_ of the principal fishing ports" of the United Kingdom. What can
+one do against those brutal British statistics? We think our towns grow
+like weeds, but London seems to grow half such a weed as Chicago in a
+single night.
+
+[Illustration: FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY]
+
+After we were got well into the town, we found ourselves part of an
+immense bicycle parade, with bicyclers of both sexes on their wheels, in
+masks and costumes, Pierrots, and Clowns, and Harlequins and Columbines,
+in a competition for the prettiest and fanciest dress.
+
+When we came to start from the station on our run to London, we
+reflected that there were a great many of these bicyclers, and that they
+would probably crowd us in our third-class compartment. So, as we had
+bought an excellent supper in baskets, such as they send you on the
+trains everywhere in England, and wished to eat it in quiet, we sought
+out the guard who was lurking near for the purpose, and bribed him to
+shut us into that compartment, and not let any one else in. There
+we remained in darkness, with our curtains drawn, and when, near
+train-time, the bicyclers began to swarm about the carriages, we heard
+them demanding admittance to our compartment from our faithful guard,
+if that is the right way to call him. He turned them away with soft
+answers, answers so very soft that we could not make out what he said,
+but he seemed to be inviting them into other compartments, which he
+doubtless pretended were better. The murmurs would die away, and then
+rise again, and from time to time we knew that a baffled bicycler was
+pulling at our door, or vainly bumping against it. We listened with our
+hearts in our mouths; but no one got in, and the train started, and we
+opened our baskets and began to eat and to drink, like two aristocrats
+or plutocrats. What made our inhuman behavior worse was that we were
+really nothing of the kind, but both professed friends of the common
+people. The story might show that when it comes to a question of
+selfishness men are all alike ready to profit by the unjust conditions.
+However, it must be remembered that those people were only bicyclers. If
+we could have conceived of them as masses we should have known them for
+brothers, and let them in, probably.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+
+
+It is only some six or seven hours by train from London to Aberystwyth,
+but if you will look at the names on a map of the Cambrian railways,
+when you begin the Welsh part of your journey, you will seem to be in a
+stranger and farther country than that of Prester John. Pwllheli, Cerrig
+y Drudion, Gwerful Goch, Festiniog, Bryn Eglwys, Llanidloes, Maertwro,
+Carnedd Fibast, Clynog Fwr, Llan-y-Mawddwy Machynlleth, Duffws, are a
+few out of the hundred names in the hills or along the valleys, giving
+the near neighborhood of England an effect of more than mid-Asian
+remoteness. The eye starts at their look; but if the jaw aches at the
+thought of pronouncing them, it is our own wilful orthographical usage
+that is at fault; the words, whose sound the letters faithfully render,
+are music, and they largely record a Christian civilization which was
+centuries old when the Saxons came to drive the Britons into the western
+mountains and to call them strangers in the immemorial home of their
+race. The Britons of the Roman conquest, who became the Welsh of the
+baffled Saxon invaders, and are the Cymry of their own history and
+poetry, still stand five feet four in their stockings, where they have
+stood from the dawn of time, an inexpugnable host of dark little men,
+defying the Saeseneg in their unintelligible, imperishable speech.
+
+
+I
+
+Of course, except in the loneliest and farthest places, they speak
+English as well as Welsh; and they misplace their aspirates, which they
+lost under the Normans as the Saxons did. But this did not happen to
+them by conquest as it did to the Saxons; they were beguiled of their
+h's when they were cheated with a Welsh-born prince instead of the Welsh
+prince they were promised in the succession of their ancient lines.
+They had been devout Christians, after their manner, in the earliest
+centuries; as the prefix Llan, or Saint, everywhere testifies, the
+country abounded in saints, whose sons inherited their saintship; and
+at the Reformation they became Calvinists as unqualifiedly as their
+kindred, the Bretons, remained Catholics. They have characterized the
+English and Americans with their strong traits in a measure which can
+be dimly traced in the spread of their ten or twenty national names, and
+they have kept even with the most modern ideals quite to the verge of
+co-education in their colleges. It is a fact which no Welshman will
+deny that Cromwell was of Welsh blood. Shakespeare was unquestionably of
+Welsh origin. Henry VII. was that Welsh Twdwr (or Tudor, as the Saeseneg
+misspell it), who set aside the Plantagenet succession, and was the
+grandsire of "the great Elizabeth," not to boast of Bloody Mary or Henry
+VIII. But if these are not enough, there is the present Chancellor of
+the Exchequer, Mr. Lloyd-George, who is now the chief figure of the
+English cabinet.
+
+The bad name which their own half-countryman, Giraldus Cambrensis, gave
+the Welsh in the twelfth century, clings to them yet in the superstition
+of all Norman-minded and Saxon-minded men, so that the Englishman I met
+on the way from Edinburgh was doubtless speaking racially rather than
+personally when he said that the Welsh were the prize liars of the
+universe. I for my part heard no lies in Wales except those I told
+myself; but as I am of Welsh stock, perhaps my experience is not wholly
+refutive of that Englishman's position. I can only urge further the
+noted philological fact that the Welsh language is so full of imagery
+that it is almost impossible to express in it the brute veracities in
+which the English speech is so apt. Otherwise I should say that nowhere
+have I been used with a more immediate and constant sincerity than in
+Wales. The people were polite and they were almost always amiable, but
+in English, at least, they did not say the thing that was not; and their
+politeness was without the servile forms from lower to higher which
+rather weary one in England. They said "Yes," and "No," but as gently as
+if they had always added "Sir." If I have it on my conscience to except
+from my sweeping praise of sincerity the expressman at Aberystwyth who
+promised that our baggage should be at our lodgings in an hour, and did
+not bring it in five, I must add that we arrived on the last day of a
+great agricultural fair, when even the New York Transfer Company might
+have given a promise of more than wonted elasticity.
+
+
+II
+
+In the station of Aberystwyth there were about three or four thousand
+Welshmen of the national height, volubly waiting for the trains to bear
+them away to their farms and villages; but they made way most amiably
+for the dismounting travellers, who in our case were led through them by
+the most energetic porter I ever knew. They did not stare down upon us
+from the unseemly altitude of other national statures, and often during
+our stay I saw like crowds of civil men in the street markets who were
+no taller, and sometimes there were women who had not scaled the heights
+reached by our American girls. They would probably have competed fairly
+well with these in the courses of the colleges to which the Welsh send
+their daughters as well as their sons; but I will not pretend that the
+good looks of either the men or women was of the American average.
+I cannot even say that these contemporary ancient Britons had the
+advantage of the toothless English peasantry in the prompt dentistry
+which is our peculiar blessing. In Great Britain, though I must not say
+Ireland, for I have never been there, a few staggering incisors seem
+a formidable equipment of the jaw in lower-class middle life and even
+tender youth. The difference is a tremendous advantage which, if it does
+not make for the highest character in us, will doubtless stand us in
+good stead in any close with the well-toothed Japanese, and when we are
+beaten, our gold-fillings will go far to pay our indemnity.
+
+After all those thousands at the station had departed, there were still
+visitors enough left in Aberystwyth to distend the hotels uncomfortably;
+and the next morning we set out in the pursuit, always interesting and
+alluring, of lodgings. The town seemed to be pretty full of lodgings,
+but as it was the middle of August, and the very height of the season,
+they were full-up in dismaying measure. We found the only one not kept
+by a Welsh woman in the ostensible keeping of an Englishwoman, a veteran
+cockney landlady, but behind her tottering throne reigned a Welsh
+girl, under whose iron rule we fell as if we had been unworthy Saeseneg
+instead of Cymric-fetched Americans. We had rejected other lodgings
+because, though their keepers had promised to provision us, it always
+appeared that we must go out and do the marketing ourselves. I shall
+lastingly regret that we did not submit to this condition, for it would
+have been one of the best means of studying the local life. But we held
+out for the London custom, and before the Welsh Power, which has
+so often made itself felt behind English thrones, could intervene,
+compliance was promised. After that it remained for the Welsh Power to
+make our stay difficult, and our going easy.
+
+[Illustration: THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH]
+
+Otherwise the place was delightful; it was in almost the centre of the
+long curve of the Victoria Terrace, with windows that looked down upon
+the pebbly beach, and over the blue sea to the bluer stretch of the
+Pembrokeshire hills on the south, and the Carnarvonshire hills on the
+north, holding the lovely waters in their shadowy embrace. There was
+not much shipping, and what there was seemed of the pleasure sort that
+parties go down to the sea to be sick in. The long parade was filled
+at most hours with the English who make the place their resort; whose
+bathing began early in the morning and whose flirting continued far
+into the night, with forenoon and afternoon dawdling and dozing on the
+pebbles. At one end of the Terrace rose a prodigious headland, whose
+slope was scaled over with broken slate, like some mammoth heaving from
+the deep and showing an elephantine hide of bluish gray. At the other
+end was the Amusement Pier, with the co-educational college, which is
+part of the University of Wales, and with divers hotels. Somewhat behind
+and beyond were the ruins of one of those castles which the Normans
+planted with a mailed fist at every vantage in Wales, as their sole
+means of holding down the swarming, squirming, fighting little dark
+people of the country. Even then they could not do it, for the Welsh,
+often overrun, were never conquered, as they will tell you themselves if
+you ask them. But Wales is now perhaps the most peaceful country in the
+world. Its prisons for the most part stand empty (it is said), and the
+people, once so turbulent, are as little given to violence as to vice.
+In fact, I once heard a great Welsh scholar declare that in the old
+times it was not the true Welsh who kept up the fighting, either on the
+public or the private scale, but the Scotch and Irish who had found
+a home among them. In any case, it is true that after the Normans had
+planted their castles in Wales to hold the country, it was all they
+could do to hold the castles, and not till their enemies had imagined
+having the English King's son born in one of them did they bring the
+Welsh under the English crown at last. Even then that uncertain people
+broke from their allegiance now and again; or the Scotch and Irish among
+them did.
+
+
+III
+
+All sorts of sights and sounds might be expected on our Terrace, but
+that which especially warmed the heart of exile in us, and pleased the
+fancy of other sojourners was the appearance, one evening, of a stately
+band of tall men in evening dress and top-hats, with musical instruments
+in their grasp, and heads lifted high above their Welsh following. We
+called the Power behind the Throne to the window in our question and she
+gave a glad cry: "Oh, they're the Neegurs! They're the white Neegurs!"
+and at sight of our compatriotic faces at the pane, these beautiful
+giants took their stand before our house, and burst into the familiar
+music of the log-cabin, the stern-wheel steamboat, and the cornfield, as
+well as the ragtime melodies of later days. It was a rich moment, and
+I know not which joyed in it more, the Welsh Power or the American
+Sufferance.
+
+But here, before I go farther afield, I must note a main difference
+between the Welsh Power and the English slavey to whom she corresponded
+in calling and condition. She was so far educated as to know the
+pseudonym of the friend who came to see us, and to have read his
+writings in the _Welsh Gazette_, treating our proposed triumph in his
+distinction with the fine scorn she used for all our airs. If she had
+been an old-fashioned Yankee Help she could not have been more snubbing;
+but when we had been taught to know our place she was more tolerant, and
+finally took leave of us without rancor.
+
+The notion of the general Welsh education which her intelligence gave us
+was carried indefinitely farther by the grocer's boy to whom our friend
+presented me one evening, after he had been struggling to make me
+understand what an _englyn_ was. I am able now to explain that it is a
+polite stanza which the Welsh send with a present of fruit or flowers,
+or for a greeting upon any worthy occasion. It is rhymed, sometimes
+at both ends of the lines, and sometimes in the middle of them, and it
+presents all the difficulties of euphony which the indomitable Welsh
+glory in overcoming. But when my friend took me in hand, my ignorance
+was of so dense a surface that he could make no impression on it, and he
+said at last, "Let us go into this grocery. There's a boy here who will
+_show_ you what an englyn is," and after I was introduced the kind youth
+did so with pleasure, while he sold candles to one customer, soap to
+another, cheese to another, and herring to another. He first wrote the
+englyn in Welsh, and when I had sufficiently admired it in that tongue
+(for which no atavistic knowledge really served me), he said he would
+put it into English, and he did so. It was then not rhymed at both ends
+or in the middle, but it was rhymed quite enough, and if it had not the
+harp-like sweetness of the original, it was still such a musical stanza
+that I shall always be sorry to have lost it. What I can never lose
+the impression of is the wide-spread literary lore of the common Welsh
+people which the incident suggested. I could not fancy even a Boston
+grocer's boy doing the like; and perhaps this was an uncommon boy in
+Wales itself. He told me a good deal, which I have mainly forgotten,
+about the state of polite learning in his country and in what honor the
+living bards were held. It seems that in that rhyming and singing little
+land, the poets are still known as of old by their bardic names. As
+Jones, or Evans, or Edwards they have no fame beyond other men, but up
+and down all Wales they are celebrated as this bard or that, and are
+honored according to their poetic worth.
+
+
+IV
+
+After the appearance of the White Neegurs on the Terrace, I could hardly
+have expected any livelier appeal to my American pride, and yet it came,
+one day, when I learned that the line of carriages which I saw passing
+our windows were the vehicles bearing to some public function the
+members of the British Chautauqua. How far the name and idea of
+Chautauqua have since spread there is no saying, but it was the last
+of our national inventions which I should have expected to find in
+Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture was reasonably in its line, and the
+Eisteddfod was not out of keeping with the summer conferences held
+beside our lovely up-State lake. The British Chautauqua, as I saw it,
+was a group of people from all parts of the United Kingdom joined in the
+pursuit of improvement and enjoyment, and they were now here on one of
+their summer outings. They had been invited to a gentleman's place not
+far from Aberystwyth to view as indubitable a remnant of the Holy Grail
+as now exists, and it was my very good fortune through the kind offices
+of that friend of ours to be invited with them.
+
+It was a blamelessly rainless afternoon, of a sort commoner on the
+western Welsh coast than on other shores of the "rainy isles," but
+not too common even there; and we drove out of the town through the
+prettiest country of hillside fields and valleys opening to the sea,
+on a road that was fairly dusty in the hot sun. There were cottages,
+grouped and detached, all the way, with gray stone walls and blue slate
+roofs, and in places the children ran out from them with mercenary
+offerings of flowers and song, or with frank pleas for charity direct. I
+yielded with reluctance to the instruction of a Manchester economist in
+my carriage, and denied them, when I would so much rather have abetted
+them in their wicked attempts on our pockets. I remember ruefully still
+that they had voices as sweet and eyes as dark as the children who used
+to chase our wheels in Italy, and I have no doubt they deserved quite as
+well of us as those did.
+
+I got back my spirits when we left our carriages, and I found myself
+walking up a pleasant avenue of wilding trees, with a young Chautauquan
+from Australia who looked as if he might be a young Chautauquan from
+Alabama, tall, and lean, and brown. We fell into talk about the trees,
+and he said how they differed in their green from the sombre gray of his
+native forests; and then he, from that vast far continent of his, spoke
+of the little island where we were, as Home. That has always a strange
+effect for us self-outcasts from the great British roof, and whether it
+makes us smile, or makes us sigh, it never fails to startle us when we
+hear it from colonial lips. The word holds in common kindness Canada and
+India and South Africa and Australia, and it has its pathos in the fact
+that the old mother of these mighty children seems to leave solely to
+them the tenderness that draws them to her in that notion of home.
+
+
+V
+
+There were about fifty of those British Chautauquans, and when they had
+ranged themselves on the grass before the shrubbery of a pleasant lawn,
+backed by a wooded slope, the dignified lady of the house came out with
+a casket in her hand, and put it on a table, and the exercises began.
+Fitly, if the casket really held the sacred relic, they began with
+prayer; then a Welsh soloist followed with a hymn, but whether she
+sang in Welsh or English, I do not remember; I am only sure she sang
+divinely; and then came the speeches. The first of the speeches was by
+our friend, who was the local Unitarian minister, and of a religious
+body not inconsiderable in that Calvinistic Wales. He told us how the
+Holy Grail had been deposited with the monks of Strata Florida, the
+famous old abbey near Aberystwyth; but I forgot who made them this
+trust, unless it was King Arthur's knights, and I am not sure whether
+the fact is matter of legend or history. What I remember is that when
+the abbey was suppressed by Henry VIII., certain of the escaping monks
+came with the relic to the gentle house where we then were, and placed
+it in the keeping of the family who have guarded it ever since.
+
+[Illustration: ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS]
+
+After our friend, the lady of this house took up the tale, and told in
+words singularly choice and simple the story of the sacred relic as the
+family knew it. I had only once before heard a woman speak, no less a
+woman than our great and dear Julia Ward Howe, and it seemed to me
+that she spoke better than any man; and I must say of the Chautauquans'
+hostess, that day, that if ever the Englishwomen come into their full
+political rights, as they seem sure to do, the traditions of good
+sense and good taste in English public speaking will not pass, but
+will prosper on through their orators. There were touches of poetry,
+nationally Welsh, in what she said, and touches of humor perhaps
+personally Welsh. It seems that the cup had been famed throughout the
+countryside for the miraculous property by which whoever drank from it
+was cured of his or her malady, and it had been passed freely round to
+all sufferers ever since it came into her family's keeping. That they
+might make doubly sure of the miracle, it was the custom of the sick
+not only to empty the cup, but to nibble a little bit of the wood, and
+swallow that, so that in whatever state the monks of Strata Florida had
+confided it, the vessel was now in the state we saw. Saying this the
+lady opened the casket holding it, and showed us the crescent-shaped rim
+of a wooden bowl, about the bigness of a cocoanut shell; all the rest
+had been consumed by the pious sufferers whom it had restored to health.
+
+I am sorry, after all, to own that this cup is said by some authorities
+not to be the Holy Grail, but a vessel like it carved out of the true
+cross. But even so subordinate a relic is priceless, and as it is no
+longer possible to drink from it, we may hope that the fragment will
+remain indefinitely to after time. When they had wondered at the sight
+of it the Chautauquans and their friend were made free of the charming
+seventeenth-century house, which would be old for this country, but
+which in the taste of that time was rather modern, and looked like the
+casino of some Italian villa. It abounded, as such houses in England do,
+in the pictured faces of the past, and in the memorials which only the
+centuries can leave behind them, but was too graceful to seem rich. "A
+home of ancient peace," it looked, in its mild gray stone amidst its
+lawns and shrubberies, the larger hold of the gardens and pleasaunces
+through which the Chautauquans followed from it.
+
+
+VI
+
+At Aberystwyth, and elsewhere in Wales, one of the things I noticed was
+the difference of the people from the people over the English border in
+their attitude toward their betters. They might stand only five feet in
+their stockings, but they stood straight, and if they were respectful,
+they were first self-respectful. In our run from Shrewsbury, their
+language first made itself generally heard at Newport, and it increased
+in the unutterable names of the stations westward, the farther we passed
+into their beautiful country, but they had always English enough to be
+civil, though never servile. The country is beautiful in the New
+England measure, but it is of a softer and smaller beauty; it looks more
+caressable; it is like Vermont rather than New Hampshire, and it is
+more like New England than Old England in the greater number of isolated
+farm-houses, from which the girls as well as the boys come to the
+university colleges for learning undreamt of by English farm villagers.
+
+The air was fresh and sweet, and though it seemed to shower wherever
+we stopped to let another train go by on a siding of our single track,
+there was a very passable sense of summer sun. The human type as we
+began to observe it and as we saw it afterward throughout the land was
+not only diminutive, but rather plain and mostly dark, in the men; as to
+the women they were, as they are everywhere, charming, with now and then
+a face of extraordinary loveliness, and nearly always the exquisite West
+of England complexion. In their manners the people could not be more
+amiable than the English, who are as amiable as possible, but they
+seemed brighter and gayer. This remained their effect to the last in
+Aberystwyth, and when one left the Terrace where the English visitors
+superabounded, the Welsh had the whole place to themselves. I would not
+push my conjecture, but it seemed to me that there was an absence of
+the cloying loyalty which makes sojourn in England afflictive to the
+republican spirit; I remember but one shop dedicated to the King's
+Majesty, with the royal arms over the door, though there may have
+been many others; I am always warning the reader not to take me too
+literally.
+
+Though I was about the streets by day and by dark, I saw no disorderly
+behavior of any kind in the town away from the beach; I do not mean
+there was any by the sea, unless some athletic courtship among the young
+people of the watering-place element was to be accounted so. There was
+not much fashion there, except in a few pretty women who recalled the
+church parade of Hyde Park in their flowery and feathery costumes.
+Back in the town there was no fashion at all, but a general decency
+and comfort of dress. The Welsh costume survives almost solely in the
+picture-postal cards, though perhaps in the hilly fastnesses the women
+still wear the steeple-crowned hats which we associate with the notion
+of witches; when they come to market in Aberystwyth they wear
+hard, shiny black straw hats like the men's. Amongst the throng of
+Saturday-night shoppers I saw none of the drunkenness that one sees so
+often in Scottish streets, and in English cities, and, I grieve to say,
+even in some New England towns. In the Welsh quarter Sunday was much
+more the Sabbath than it was on the Terrace, where indeed it seemed a
+day of pleasure rather than praise.
+
+
+VII
+
+All the week I had the best intention of hearing the singing in some of
+the Welsh churches, but my goodwill could not carry the day against the
+fear of a sermon which I should not understand. A chance sermon would
+probably have touched upon the education act which was then stirring
+all Dissenting England and Wales to passive resistance, and from
+Lincolnshire to Carnarvonshire was causing the distraint of tables
+and chairs, tools, hams, clocks, clothing, poultry, and crops for the
+payment of such part of the Dissenters' taxes as would go to the support
+of the Church schools. Possibly it might also have referred to the Walk
+Out of the Welsh Members of Parliament; this was an incident which I
+heard mentioned as of imperial importance, though what caused it or came
+of it I do not know.
+
+Instead of going to church, I strolled up and down the Terrace and
+observed the watering-place life. The town was evidently full, or
+at least all the lodging-houses were, and as it is with the English
+everywhere in their summer resorts, there were men enough to go round,
+so that no poor dear need pine for a mate on that pleasant beach.
+Aberystwyth is therefore to be commended to our overflow of girls,
+though whether there are many eligible noblemen among those youth I have
+not the statistics for saying. All the visitors may have been people
+of rank; I only know that I was told they were mostly from the midland
+cities, and they seemed to be having the good time which people of brief
+outings alone have. The bathing began, as I have noted, very early in
+the day with the men in the briefest possible tights; the women, for
+compensation, wore long trousers with their bathing-skirts, and
+they enhanced the modesty of their effect by the universal use of
+bathing-machines, pushed well away from the curious shore. There was not
+much variety in the visiting English type, but there was here and there
+a sharp imperial accent, as in the two pale little, spindle-legged
+Anglo-Indian boys, with their Hindu ayah, very dark, with sleek dark
+hair, and gleaming eyes in a head not much bigger than a black walnut.
+
+The crescent of the beach was a serried series of hotels and
+lodging-houses, from tip to tip, but back of these were streets
+of homelike, smallish dwellings, that broke rank farther away, and
+scattered about in suburban villas, with trees and flowers and grass
+around them. Beyond stretched, as well as it could stretch among its
+hills, the charming country of fields, and woods, and orchards.
+
+
+VIII
+
+I suppose I did not quite do my duty by the ruins of the Norman castle,
+and I feel that it is now too late to repair my neglect. The stronghold
+was more than once attempted by the Welsh in those wars which make their
+history a catalogue of battles, but it held out Norman till the Normans
+turned English. Owen Glendover took it in 1402, when it was three
+hundred years old, though not yet feeble with age, and in due time one
+of Cromwell's lieutenants destroyed it. Some very picturesque fragments
+remain to attest the grace and strength of the ancient hold. It is
+near the University College and the Amusement Pier, so that the mere
+sight-seers can do all the ordinary objects of interest at Aberystwyth
+in half a day or half an hour. But we were none of these. We had fallen
+in love with the place, and we would fain have stayed on after the
+week was up for which we had taken our lodging. It appeared from a
+house-to-house canvass, that there was no other lodging to be had in all
+that long crescent of the Terrace; or, if this is incredible, there was
+none we would have. Our successors were impending; and though I think
+our English landlady might have invented something for us at the last
+moment, the Welsh Power was inexorable. Her ideal was lodgers who would
+go out and buy their own provisions, and we had set our faces against
+that. Some one must yield, and the Welsh Power could not; it was not in
+her nature. We were therefore in a manner expelled from Aberystwyth, but
+our banishment was not from all Wales, and this was how we went next to
+Llandudno.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+
+
+Froissart's saying, if it was Froissart's, that the English amuse
+themselves sadly antedates that notion of Merry England which is now
+generally rejected by serious observers. I should myself prefer the
+agnostic position, and say that I did not know whether the English were
+glad or not when they looked gay. What I seem to be certain of, but I
+do not say that I am certain, is that they look gayer in their places
+of amusement than we do. I do not mean theatres, or parliaments, or
+music-halls, or lecture-rooms, by places of amusement, but what we
+call summer resorts a little more largely than those resorts which the
+English call watering-places. Of these I should like to take as a type
+the charming summer resort on the coast of North Wales which is called
+Llandudno in print, and in speech several different ways.
+
+
+I
+
+The English simply and frankly, after their blunt nature, call the place
+Landudno, but the Welsh call it, according to one superstition of their
+double _l_ and their French _u_, Thlandidno. According to another, we
+cannot spell it in English at all; but it does not much matter, for
+the last superstition is the ever-delightful but ever-doubtful George
+Borrow's, who says that the Welsh _ll_ is the same as the Spanish _ll_,
+but who is probably mistaken, most other authorities agreeing that if
+you pronounce it _lhl_ you will come as near it as any Saeseneg need.
+It is a constantly besetting question in Wales, where the prefix _Llan_
+speckles the map all over, owing to that multitude of Saints who peopled
+the country in the times when a Saint's sons were every one saints, and
+none was of particularly holy, or even good life, because he was known
+for a saint. Like a continental noble, he inherited his title equally
+with all his brothers.
+
+But through whatever orthoepic mazes you search it, Llandudno has every
+claim on your regard and admiration. Like Aberystwyth, its sea front is
+a shallow crescent, but vaster, with a larger town expanding back of it,
+and with loftier and sublimer headlands, at either end, closing it in a
+more symmetrical frame. But I should say that its sea was not so blue,
+or its sky either, and its air was not so soft or dry. Morally it is
+more constantly lively, with a greater and more insistent variety of
+entertainments. For the American its appeal might well have begun with
+the sight of his country's flag floating over a tennis-ground at the
+neighboring watering-place and purer Welsh town of Rhyl. The approach to
+his affections was confirmed by another American flag displayed before
+one of the chief hotels in Llandudno itself. I learned afterward of the
+landlord that this was because there were several Chicago families in
+his house, and fifteen Americans in all; but why the tennis-ground of
+Rhyl flew our national banner, I do not know to this day. It was
+indeed that gentle moment when our innocent people believed themselves
+peculiarly dear to the English, and might naturally suppose, if from
+Chicago, or Boston, or Denver, that the English would wish to see as
+often as possible the symbol of our successful revolt from the princes
+and principles to which they have religiously adhered.
+
+[Illustration: LLANDUDNO--THE CITY AND HARBOR]
+
+Both that home of the patriotic Chicago families, and the other best
+hotel were too full for us, and after a round of the second-best we
+decided for lodgings, hoping as usual that they would bring us nearer
+the native life. The best we could get, facing the sea midway of the
+crescent, were not exactly Welsh in their keeping. The landladies were,
+in fact, two elderly Church-of-England sisters from Dublin, who had
+named their house out of a novel they had read. They said they believed
+the name was Italian, and the reader shall judge if it were so from its
+analogue of Osier Wood. The maids in the house, however, were very truly
+and very wickedly Welsh: two tough little ponies of girls, who tied
+their hair up with shoe-strings, and were forbidden, when about their
+work, to talk Welsh together, lest they should speak lezing of those
+Irish ladies. The rogues were half English, but the gentle creature
+who served our table was wholly Welsh; small, sweet-voiced, dark-eyed,
+intelligent, who suffered from the universal rheumatism of the British
+Isles, but kept steadily to her duty, and accepted her fate with
+patience and even cheerfulness. She waited on several other tables, for
+the house was full of lodgers, all rather less permanent than ourselves,
+who were there for a fortnight; we found our landladies hoping, when we
+said we were going, to have had us with them through the winter.
+
+
+II
+
+Our fellow-lodgers were quiet people of divers degrees, except perhaps
+the highest, unless the nobility bring boiled hams with them when they
+visit the seaside. The boiled ham of the drawing-room floor was frankly
+set out on the hall table, where it seemed to last a week, or at least
+till the lodgers went away. There was much coming and going, for it was
+the height of the season, with the prices at flood tide. We paid six
+guineas a week for three bedrooms and a sitting-room; but our landladies
+owned it was dear. An infirm and superannuated sideboard served for a
+dressing-table in one room; in others the heavier pieces of furniture
+stood sometimes on four legs, sometimes on three. We had the advantage
+of two cats on the back fence, and a dog in the back yard; but if the
+controversy between them was carried on in Welsh, it is no wonder we
+never knew what it was about.
+
+Our hostesses said the Welsh were dirty housekeepers: "At least _we_
+think so," but I am bound to say their own cooking was very good; and
+not being Welsh our hostesses consented to market for us, except in the
+article of Spanish melons: these I bought myself of increasing cost and
+size. When I alleged, the second morning, that the melon then sold
+me for sixpence had been sold me by another boy for fourpence the day
+before, my actual Cymric youth said, "Then he asked you too little,"
+which seemed a _non sequitur_ but was really an unexpected stroke of
+logic.
+
+It was the utmost severity used with me by my co-racials in Llandudno.
+They were in the great majority of the permanent inhabitants, but they
+were easily outnumbered among the pleasurers by the Saeseneg, whose
+language prevailed, so that a chance word of Welsh now and then was all
+that I heard in the streets. Some faint stirrings of ambition to follow
+the language as far as a phrase-book would lead were not encouraged by
+the kindly bookseller who took my money for it; and I did not go on. It
+is a loss for me in literature which translation cannot supply, for
+the English lovers of Welsh poetry, after praising it to the skies,
+are never able to produce anything which is not direly mechanical and
+vacuous. The native charm somehow escapes them; the grace beyond the
+reach of art remains with the Cymric poets who have resources for its
+capture unknown to their English admirers. George Borrow seems the worst
+failure in this sort, and the worst offender in giving his reader the
+hopes he never fulfils, so that his _Wild Wales_ is a desert of blighted
+literary promises. I believe that the merit of Welsh poetry dwells
+largely, perhaps overlargely, in its intricate technique, and in the
+euphonic changes which leave the spoken word ready for singing almost
+without the offices of the composer.
+
+
+III
+
+One of the great musical contests, the yearly national Eisteddfod, was
+taking place that year at the neighboring town of Rhyl, but I did not go
+to hear it, not being good for a week's music without intermission.
+At Llandudno there was only the music of the Pierrots and the Niggers,
+which those simple-hearted English have borrowed, the one from
+France and the other from these States. Their passion for our colored
+minstrelsy is, in fact, something pathetic. They like Pierrots well
+enough, and Pierrots _are_ amusing, there is no doubt of it; but they
+dote upon Niggers, as they call them with a brutality unknown among us
+except to the vulgarest white men and boys, and the negroes themselves
+in moments of exasperation. Negro minstrelsy is almost extinct in the
+land of its birth, but in the land of its adoption it flourishes in the
+vigor of undying youth: no watering-place is genuine without it. Bands
+of Niggers haunt the streets and suburbs of London, and apparently every
+high day or holiday throughout the British Islands requires the stamp of
+their presence as a nostrum requires the name of the patentee blown in
+the bottle. The decay of their gay science began among us with the fall
+of slavery, and the passing of the old plantation life; but as these
+never existed in Great Britain the English version of negro minstrelsy
+is not affected by their disappearance. It is like the English tradition
+of the Red Skins, which has all but vanished from our superstition, but
+remains as powerful as ever in the constant fancy of those islanders.
+
+The English like their Niggers very, very black, and as their Niggers
+are English they know how to gratify the national preference: such a
+spread of scarlet lips over half the shining sable face is known nowhere
+else in nature or art; and it must have been in despair of rivalling
+their fellow-minstrels that the small American troupe we saw at
+Aberystwyth went to the opposite extreme and frankly appeared as the
+White Neegurs. At Llandudno the blackness of the Niggers was absolute,
+so that it almost darkened the day as they passed our lodging, along the
+crescent of the beach on their way to their open-air theatre beyond it.
+They were followed by a joyous retinue of boys and girls, tradesmen's
+apprentices, donkeys, bath-chairs, and all the movable gladness of the
+watering-place, to the music of their banjos and the sound of their
+singing. They were going to a fold of the foot-hills called the Happy
+Valley, bestowed on the public for such pleasures by the local nobleman
+whose title is given to a principal street, and to other points and
+places, I suppose out of the public pride and gratitude. It is a
+charming amphitheatre overlooked by the lofty tops around, and there
+on the green slope the Niggers had set up their stage, and ranged the
+spectators' chairs in the classification of first, second, and third so
+dear to the British soul. There they cracked their jokes, and there they
+sang their songs; the songs were newer than the jokes, but they were
+both kinds delivered with a strong Cockney accent, and without an
+aspirate in its place. But it was all richly acceptable to the audience,
+who laughed and cheered and joined in the chorus when asked. Here,
+as everywhere, the crowd delighted equally in songs of the sloppiest
+sentimentality and of humor nighest indecency.
+
+[Illustration: LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME'S NECK]
+
+On the afternoon of our visit the good lady next me could not contain
+her peculiar pride in the entertainment, and confided that she knew the
+leader of the troupe, who was an old friend of her husband's. It was
+indeed a time and place that invited to expansion. Nothing could have
+been friendlier and livelier than the spectacle of the spectators spread
+over the grassy slope, or sublimer than the rise of the hills around, or
+more enchanting than the summer sea, with the large and little shipping
+on it, and the passenger-steamers going and coming from Liverpool and
+all the points in the region round. The two headlands which mark the
+limits of the beautiful beach, Great Orme's Head, and Little Orme's
+Head, are both of a nobleness tempered to kindliness by the soft and
+manageable beauty of their forms. I never got quite so far as Little
+Orme's Head, for it was full two miles from our lodging, and a fortnight
+was not long enough for the journey, but with Great Orme's Head I was on
+terms of very tolerable intimacy. A road of the excellence peculiar to
+England passes round on the chin, so to speak, and though I never went
+the length of it, I went far enough to know the majesty of the seaward
+prospect. From the crown of the Head there is a view of perhaps all the
+mountains in Wales, which from this point appears entirely composed of
+mountains, blue, blue and enchantingly fair. On the townward side you
+may descend into the Happy Valley, as we did, and find always a joyous
+crowd listening to the Niggers. If, after some doubt of your way, you
+have the favor of a nice boy and an intelligent collie dog, whom the boy
+is helping herd home the evening cows of a pleasant farm, you will
+have a charming glimpse of the local civilization; and perhaps you will
+notice that the cows do not pay much attention to the boy, but obey the
+dog implicitly; it is their Old World convention.
+
+
+IV
+
+From another side we had ascended the mountain by the tram line which
+climbs it to the top, and at every twist and turn lavishes some fresh
+loveliness of landscape upon your vision. Near by, we noticed many
+depressions and sinkages in the ground, and a conversable man in
+well-oiled overalls who joined us at a power-house, said it was from the
+giving way of the timbers in the disused copper-mines. Were they very
+old, we asked, and he said they had not been worked for forty years; but
+this, when you come to think of the abandoned Roman mines yet deeper
+in the hill, was a thing of yesterday. The man in the oily overalls
+had evidently not come to think of it, but he was otherwise a very
+intelligent mechanic, and of a hospitable mind, like all the rest of our
+chance acquaintance in Great Britain. I do not know that I like to think
+of those Roman mines myself, where it is said the sea now surges back
+and forth: they must have been worked by British slaves, who may be
+fancied climbing purblindly out when the legions left Britain, and not
+joining very loudly in the general lamentation at their withdrawal,
+but probably tempering the popular grief with the reflection that the
+heathen Saxons could not be much worse.
+
+The hill-top was covered with the trippers who seem perpetually
+holidaying on their island, and who were always kind to their children
+when they had them, and to each other when they had not. They were
+commonly in couples, very affectionate and inoffensively young. They
+wandered about, and from time to time went and had tea at one of the
+tea-houses which are always at hand over there. Except the view there
+was not much to see; the ways were rough; now and then you came to a
+pink cottage or a white one where the peasantry, again, sold tea. At one
+place in our walk over the occiput of Great Orme's Head into the Happy
+Valley in its bosom, we fell a prey to a conspiracy of boys selling
+mignonette: it appeared to be a mignonette trust, or syndicate,
+confining its commerce to that flower.
+
+I have no other statistics to offer concerning business on Great Orme's
+Head, or indeed in all Llandudno. One of the chief industries seemed to
+be coaching, for a score of delightful places are to be easily reached
+by the stages always departing from the hotels on the Parade. There was
+no particularly noticeable traffic in leek, though I suppose that as I
+did not see the national emblem in any Welshman's hat--to be sure, it
+was not St. David's Day--it must have been boiling in every Welshman's
+pot. I am rather ashamed to be joining, even at this remove, in the poor
+English joking which goes on about the Welsh, quite as much as about the
+Scotch, the Irish having become too grave a matter for joking. There
+are little burlesque manuals making merry with the language and its
+agglutinative prolixity, which I shall certainly not quote; and
+there are postal-cards representing Welsh dames drinking tea in tall
+witch-hats, with one of them saying: "I wass enjoying myself shocking,
+look you." There was, of course, nothing serious in this joking; the
+Welsh, who have all the small commerce in their hands, gladly sold the
+manuals and postals, and I did not see one Englishman laughing over
+them.
+
+The Saeseneg visitors rather amused themselves with the sea and the
+resources of the beach and the bathing. As contrasted with the visitors
+at Aberystwyth, so distinctly in the earlier and later stages of
+love-making, I should say those at Llandudno were domestic: fathers and
+mothers who used the long phalanx of bathing-machines appointed to their
+different sexes, and their children who played in the sand. I thought
+the children charming, and I contributed tuppence to aid in the repair
+of the sand castle of two nice little boys which had fallen down; it now
+seems strange that I should have been asked for a subscription, but in
+England subscriptions spare nobody; though I wonder if two such nice
+little boys would have come to me for money in America. Besides the
+entertainment of lying all afternoon on the beach, or sitting beside it
+in canopied penny chairs, there was more active diversion for all ages
+and sexes in the circus prevailing somewhere in the background,
+and advertising itself every afternoon by a procession of six young
+elephants neatly carrying each in his trunk the tail of the elephant
+before him. There were also the delightful shows of the amusement pier
+where one could go and see Pierrots to one's heart's content, if one can
+ever get enough of Pierrots; I never can.
+
+[Illustration: THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO]
+
+Besides all these daytime things there were two very good theatres, at
+one of which I saw Mr. Barrie's _Little Mary_ given better than in New
+York (that was easy), and at the other a comic opera, with a bit of
+comedy or tragedy in a stage-box, not announced in the bills. The
+audience was otherwise decorous enough to be composed of Welsh Baptist
+elders and their visiting friends, but in this box there were two young
+men in evening dress, scuffling with a young woman in dinner decolletee,
+and what appeared to be diamonds in her ears. They were trying,
+after what seems the convention of English seaside flirtation, to get
+something out of her hand, and allowing her successfully to resist them;
+and their playful contest went on through a whole act to the distraction
+of the spectators, who did not seem greatly scandalized. It suggested
+the misgiving that perhaps bad people came to Llandudno for their summer
+outing as well as good; but there was no interference by the police or
+the management with this robust side-show. Were the actors in the scene,
+all or any of them, too high in rank to be lightly molested in their
+lively event; or were they too low? Perhaps they were merely tipsy,
+but all the same their interlude was a contribution to the evening's
+entertainment which would not have been so placidly accepted in, say,
+Atlantic City, or Coney Island, or even Newport, where people are said
+to be more accustomed to the caprices of society persons, and more
+indulgent of their whims.
+
+
+V
+
+A more improving, and on the whole more pleasing, phase of the
+indigenous life, and also more like a phase of our own, showed itself
+the day of our visit to Conway, a little way from Llandudno. There, on
+our offering to see the ruins of the wonderful and beautiful old castle,
+we were met at the entrance with a demand for an exceptional shilling
+gate money, because of the fair for the local Wesleyan Chapel which was
+holding in the interior. What seemed at first a hardship turned out a
+chance which we would not have missed on any account. There was a large
+tent set up in the old castle court, and a table spread with home-made
+dainties of many sorts, and waited upon by gentle maids and matrons who
+served one with tea or whatever else one liked, all for that generously
+inclusive shilling. They were Welsh, they told us, and they were
+speaking their language to right and left of us, while they were so
+courteous to us in English. It was quite like a church fair in some
+American village, where, however, it could not have had the advantage
+of a ruined Norman castle for its scene, and where it would not have
+provided a range for target practice with air-guns, or grounds for
+running and jumping.
+
+The place was filled with people young and old who were quietly amusing
+themselves and were more taken up with the fair than with the castle.
+I must myself comparatively slight the castle in the present study of
+people rather than places, though I may note that if there is any
+more interesting ruin in the world, I am satisfied with this which it
+surpasses. Besides its beauty, what strikes one most is its perfect
+adaptation to the original purpose of palace and fortress for which the
+Normans planned their strongholds in Wales. The architect built not only
+with a constant instinct of beauty, but with unsurpassable science and
+skill. The skill and the science have gone the way of the need of them,
+but the beauty remains indelible and as eternal as the hunger for it
+in the human soul. Conway castle is not all a ruin, even as a fortress,
+however. Great part of it still challenges decay, and is so entire in
+its outward shape that it has inspired the railway running under its
+shoulder to attempt a conformity of style in the bridge approaching it,
+but without enabling it to an equal effect of grandeur. One would as
+soon the bridge had not tried.
+
+All Conway is worthy, within its ancient walls, of as much devotion as
+one can render it in the rain, which begins as soon as you leave the
+castle. The walls climb from the waters to the hills, and the streets
+wander up and down and seem to the stranger mainly to seek that
+beautiful old Tudor house, Plas Mawr, which like the castle is without
+rival in its kind. It was full of reeking and streaming sight-seers,
+among whom one could easily find one's self incommoded without feeling
+one's self a part of the incommodation, but in spite of them there was
+the assurance of comfort as well as splendor in the noble old mansion,
+such as the Elizabethan houses so successfully studied. In the
+dining-room a corner of the mantel has its sandstone deeply worn
+away, and a much-elbowed architect, who was taking measurements of the
+chimney, agreed that this carf was the effect of the host or the butler
+flying to the place and sharpening his knife for whatever haunch of
+venison or round of beef was toward. It was a fine memento of the
+domestic past, and there was a secret chamber where the refugees of this
+cause or that in other times were lodged in great discomfort. Besides,
+there was a ghost which was fairly crowded out of its accustomed
+quarters, where so far from being able to walk, it would have had much
+ado to stand upright by flattening itself against the wall.
+
+
+VI
+
+In fact, there was not much more room that day in the Plas Mawr, than in
+the Smallest House in the World, which is the next chiefest attraction
+of Conway. This, too, was crammed with damp enthusiasts, passionately
+eager to sign their names in the guest-book. They scarcely left space in
+the sitting-room of ten by twelve feet for the merry old hostess selling
+photographs and ironically inviting her visitors' guests to a glimpse
+of the chamber overhead, or so much of it as the bed allowed to be seen.
+She seemed not to believe in her abode as a practicable tenement, and
+could not be got to say that she actually lived in it; as to why it was
+built so small she was equally vague. But there it was, to like or to
+leave, and there, not far off, was the "briny beach" where the Walrus
+and the Carpenter walked together,--
+
+     "And wept like anything to see
+      Such quantities of sand."
+
+For it was in Conway, as history or tradition is, that _Through the
+Looking-Glass_ was written.
+
+There are very few places in those storied British Isles which are
+not hallowed by some association with literature; but I suppose that
+Llandudno is as exempt as any can be, and I will not try to invoke any
+dear and honored shade from its doubtful obscurity. We once varied the
+even tenor of our days there by driving to Penmaenmawr, and wreaking our
+love of literary associations so far as we might by connecting the place
+with the memory of Gladstone, who was literary as well as political. We
+thought with him that Penmaenmawr was "the most charming watering-place
+in Wales," and as you drive into the place, the eye of faith will
+detect the house, on the right, in which he spent many happy summers. We
+contented ourselves with driving direct to the principal hotel, where
+I know not what kept us from placing ourselves for life. We had tea and
+jam en the pretty lawn, and the society of a large company of wasps of
+the yellow-jacket variety, which must have been true Welsh wasps, as
+peaceful as they were musical, and no interloping Scotch or Irish, for
+they did not offer to attack us, but confined themselves altogether to
+our jam: to be sure, we thought best to leave it to them.
+
+[Illustration: CONWAY CASTLE]
+
+It is said that the purple year is not purpler at any point on the
+southernmost shores of England than it is at Llandudno. In proof of the
+mildness of its winter climate, the presence of many sorts of tender
+evergreens is alleged, and the persistence of flowers in blooming from
+Christmas to Easter. But those who have known the deceitful habits of
+flowers on the Riviera, where they bloom in any but an arctic degree of
+cold, will not perhaps hurry to Llandudno much later than November.
+All the way to Penmaenmawr the flowers showed us what they could do in
+summer, whether in field or garden, and there was one beautiful hill
+on which immense sweeps and slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather
+boldly stretched separately, or mingled their dyes in the fearlessness
+of nature when she spurns the canons of art. I suppose there is no
+upholsterer or paperhanger who would advise mixing or matching yellow
+and purple in the decoration of a room, but here the outdoor effect rapt
+the eye in a transport of delight. It was indeed a day when almost any
+arrangement of colors would have pleased.
+
+
+VII
+
+It is not easy in that much summer-resorted region to get at the country
+in other than its wilder moods; it is either town or mountain; but now
+and then one found one's self among harvest-fields, where the yield of
+wheat and oats was far heavier than with us, either because the soil was
+richer or the tilth thorougher. The farms indeed looked very fertile,
+and the farmhouses very alluringly clean and neat, at least on the
+outside. They were not gray, as in the West of England, or brick as
+in the Southeast, but were of stone whitewashed, and the roofs were of
+slate, and not thatch or tile. As I have noted, they were not so much
+gathered into villages as in England, and again, as I have noted, it
+is out of such houses that the farmers' boys and girls go to the
+co-educational colleges of the Welsh University. It is still the
+preference of the farmers that their sons should be educated for the
+ministry, which in that country of multiplied dissents has pulpits for
+every color of contrary-mindedness, as well as livings of the not yet
+disestablished English Church. It is not indeed the English Church in
+speech. The Welsh will have their service and their sermon in their own
+tongue, and when an Oxford or Cambridge man is given a Welsh living, he
+must do what he can to conform to the popular demand. It is said that
+in one case, where the incumbent long held out against the parish,
+he compromised by reading the service in Welsh with the English
+pronunciation. But the Welsh churches are now supplied with
+Welsh-speaking clergy, though whether it is well for the Welsh to cling
+so strongly to their ancient speech is doubted by many Welshmen. These
+hold that it cramps and dwarfs the national genius; but in the mean time
+in Ireland the national genius, long enlarged to our universal English,
+offers the strange spectacle of an endeavor to climb back into its
+Gaelic shell.
+
+[Illustration: PLAS MAWR]
+
+I do not know whether an incident of my experience in coming from
+Chester to Llandudno is to be offered as an illustration of Welsh
+manners or of English manners. A woman of the middle rank, certainly
+below gentlewoman, but very personable and well dressed, got into our
+carriage where there was no seat for her. She was no longer young, but
+she was not so old as the American who offered her his seat. She refused
+it, but consented to sit on the hand-bag and rug which he arranged for
+her, and so remained till she left the train, while a half-grown boy
+and several young men kept their countenances and their places, not
+apparently dreaming of offering her a seat, or if they thought of her
+at all, thought she was well punished for letting the guard crowd her
+in upon us. By her stature and complexion she was undoubtedly Welsh, and
+these youth from theirs were as undoubtedly English. Perhaps, then, the
+incident had better be offered as an illustration of Welsh and English
+manners combined.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER
+
+
+Nothing is so individual in any man as the peculiar blend of
+characteristics which he has inherited from his racial ancestries. The
+Englishman, who leaves the stamp of the most distinct personality upon
+others, is the most mixed, the most various, the most relative of all
+men. He is not English except as he is Welsh, Dutch, and Norman, with
+"a little Latin and less Greek" from his earliest visitors and invaders.
+This conception of him will indefinitely simplify the study of his
+nature if it is made in the spirit of the frank superficiality which I
+propose to myself. After the most careful scrutiny which I shall be
+able to give him, he will remain, for every future American, the
+contradiction, the anomaly, the mystery which I expect to leave him.
+
+
+I
+
+No error of the Englishman's latest invader is commoner than the notion,
+which perhaps soonest suggests itself, that he is a sort of American,
+tardily arriving at our kind of consciousness, with the disadvantages
+of an alien environment, after apparently hopeless arrest in unfriendly
+conditions. The reverse may much more easily be true; we may be a sort
+of Englishmen, and the Englishman, if he comes to us and abides with
+us, may become a sort of American. But that is the affair of a possible
+future, and the actual Englishman is certainly not yet any sort of
+American, unless, indeed, for good and for bad, he is a better sort
+of Bostonian. He does not even speak the American language, whatever
+outlandish accent he uses in speaking his own. It may be said, rather
+too largely, too loosely, that the more cultivated he is, the more he
+will speak like a cultivated American, until you come to the King,
+or the Royal Family, with whom a strong German accent is reported to
+prevail. The Englishman may write American, if he is a very good
+writer, but in no case does he spell American. He prefers, as far as
+he remembers it, the Norman spelling, and, the Conqueror having said
+"_geole_," the Conquered print "gaol," which the American invader must
+pronounce "jail," not "gayol."
+
+The mere mention of the Royal Family advances us to the most marked of
+all the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is
+not superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned
+principle, but a passion induced by the general volition. Whatever
+it is, it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly
+pervasive of the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago--say, fifteen
+or twenty--it was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known
+at all with many in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges, or
+the time of the happy-go-lucky sailor William; in the earlier time of
+Victoria, it was a chivalrous devotion among the classes, and with the
+masses an affection which almost no other sovereign has inspired. I
+should not be going farther than some Englishmen if I said that her
+personal character saved the monarchy; when she died there was not a
+vestige of the republican dream which had remained from a sentiment
+for "the free peoples of antiquity" rather than from the Commonwealth.
+Democracy had indeed effected itself in a wide-spread socialism, but the
+kingship was safe in the hearts of the Queen's subjects when the Prince
+of Wales, who was the first of them, went about praising loyalty as
+prime among the civic virtues and duties. The notion took the general
+fancy, and met with an acceptance in which the old superstition of kings
+by divine right was resuscitated with the vulgar. One of the vulgar
+lately said to an American woman who owned that we did not yield an
+equal personal fealty to all our Presidents, "Oh yes, but you know that
+it is only your _people_ that choose the President, but _God_ gave us
+the King." Nothing could be opposed to a belief so simple, as in the
+churches of the eldest faith the humble worshipper could not well be
+told that the picture or the statue of his adoration was not itself
+sacred. In fact, it is not going too far, at least for a very
+adventurous spirit, to say that loyalty with the English is a sort of
+religious principle. What is with us more or less a joke, sometimes
+bad, sometimes good, namely, our allegiance to the powers that be in the
+person of the Chief Magistrate, is with them a most serious thing, at
+which no man may smile without loss.
+
+I was so far from wishing myself to smile at it, that I darkled most
+respectfully about it, without the courage to inquire directly into the
+mystery. If it was often on my tongue to ask, "What is loyalty? How
+did you come by it? Why are you loyal?"--I felt that it would be
+embarrassing when it would not be offensive, and I should vainly plead
+in excuse that this property of theirs mystified me the more because it
+seemed absolutely left out of the American nature. I perceived that in
+the English it was not less really present because it was mixed, or used
+to be mixed, with scandal that the alien can do no more than hint at.
+That sort of abuse has long ceased, and if one were now to censure the
+King, or any of the Royal Family, it would be felt to be rather ill
+bred, and quite unfair, since royalty is in no position to reply to
+criticism. Even the Socialists would think it ill-mannered, though
+in their hearts, if not in their sleeves, they must all the while be
+smiling at the notion of anything sacred in the Sovereign.
+
+[Illustration: A PRESENTATION AT COURT]
+
+
+II
+
+Loyalty, like so many other things in England, is a convention to which
+the alien will tacitly conform in the measure of his good taste or his
+good sense. It is not his affair, and in the mean time it is a most
+curious and interesting spectacle; but it is not more remarkable,
+perhaps, than the perfect acquiescence in the aristocratic forms of
+society which hedge the King with their divinity. We think that family
+counts for much with ourselves, in New England or in Virginia; but it
+counts for nothing at all in comparison with the face value at which it
+is current in England. We think we are subject to our plutocracy, when
+we are very much out of humor or out of heart, in some such measure as
+the commoners of England are subject to the aristocracy; but that is
+nonsense. A very rich man with us is all the more ridiculous for his
+more millions; he becomes a byword if not a hissing; he is the meat of
+the paragrapher, the awful example of the preacher; his money is found
+to smell of his methods. But in England, the greater a nobleman is,
+the greater his honor. The American mother who imagines marrying her
+daughter to an English duke, cannot even imagine an English
+duke--say, like him of Devonshire, or him of Northumberland, or him
+of Norfolk--with the social power and state which wait upon him in his
+duchy and in the whole realm; and so is it in degree down to the latest
+and lowest of the baronets, and of those yet humbler men who have been
+knighted for their merits and services in medicine, in literature, in
+art. The greater and greatest nobles are established in a fear which is
+very like what the fear of God used to be when the common people feared
+Him; and, though they are potent political magnates, they mainly rule
+as the King himself does, through the secular reverence of those beneath
+them for their titles and the visible images of their state. They are
+wealthy men, of course, with so much substance that, when one now and
+then attempts to waste it, he can hardly do so; but their wealth alone
+would not establish them in the popular regard. His wealth does no
+such effect for Mr. Astor in England; and mere money, though it is much
+desired by all, is no more venerated in the person of its possessor than
+it is with us. It is ancestry, it is the uncontested primacy of families
+first in their place, time out of mind, that lays its resistless hold
+upon the fancy and bows the spirit before it. By means of this comes
+the sovereign effect in the political as well as the social state; for,
+though the people vote into or out of power those who vote other people
+into or out of the administration, it is always--or so nearly always
+that the exception proves the rule--family that rules, from the King
+down to the least attache of the most unimportant embassy. No doubt many
+of the English are restive under the fact; and, if one had asked their
+mind about it, one might have found them frank enough; but, never asking
+it, it was with amusement that I heard said once, as if such a thing had
+never occurred to anybody before, "Yes, isn't it strange that those few
+families should keep it all among themselves!" It was a slender female
+voice, lifted by a young girl with an air of pensive surprise, as at a
+curious usage of some realm of faery.
+
+
+III
+
+England is in fact, to the American, always a realm of faery, in its
+political and social constitution. It must be owned, concerning the
+government by family, that it certainly seems to work well. That
+justifies it, so far as the exclusion of the immense majority from the
+administration of their own affairs can be justified by anything;
+though I hold that the worst form of graft in office is hardly less
+justifiable: that is, at least, one of the people picking their pockets.
+But it is the universal make-believe behind all the practical virtue of
+the state that constitutes the English monarchy a realm of faery. The
+whole population, both the great and the small, by a common effort of
+the will, agree that there is a man or a woman of a certain line who
+can rightfully inherit the primacy amongst them, and can be dedicated
+through this right to live the life of a god, to be so worshipped and
+flattered, so cockered about with every form of moral and material
+flummery, that he or she may well be more than human not to be made a
+fool of. Then, by a like prodigious stroke of volition, the inhabitants
+of the enchanted island universally agree that there is a class of them
+which can be called out of their names in some sort of title, bestowed
+by some ancestral or actual prince, and can forthwith be something
+different from the rest, who shall thenceforth do them reverence, them
+and their heirs and assigns, forever. By this amusing process, the realm
+of faery is constituted, a thing which could not have any existence in
+nature, yet by its existence in fancy becomes the most absolute of human
+facts.
+
+It is not surprising that, in the conditions which ensue, snobbishness
+should abound; the surprising thing would be if it did not abound. Even
+with ourselves, who by a seven years' struggle burst the faery dream a
+century ago, that least erected spirit rears its loathly head from the
+dust at times, and in our polite press we can read much if we otherwise
+see nothing of its subtle influence. But no evil is without its
+compensating good, and the good of English snobbishness is that it
+has reduced loyalty, whether to the prince or to the patrician, from a
+political to a social significance. That is, it does so with the upper
+classes; with the lower, loyalty finds expression in an unparalleled
+patriotism. An Englishman of the humble or the humbler life may know
+very well that he is not much in himself; but he believes that England
+stands for him, and that royalty and nobility stand for England. Both
+of these, there, are surrounded by an atmosphere of reverence wholly
+inconceivable to the natives of a country where there are only
+millionaires to revere.
+
+
+IV
+
+The most curious thing is that the persons in the faery dream seem to
+believe it as devoutly as the simplest and humblest of the dreamers. The
+persons in the dream apparently take themselves as seriously as if there
+were or could be in reality kings and lords. They could not, of course,
+do so if they were recently dreamed, as they were, say, in the France
+of the Third Empire. There, one fancies, these figments must have always
+been smiling in each other's faces when they were by themselves. But
+the faery dream holds solidly in England because it is such a very old
+dream. Besides, the dream does not interfere with the realities; it even
+honors them. If a man does any great thing in England, the chief figure
+of the faery dream recognizes his deed, stoops to him, lifts him up
+among the other figures, and makes him part of the dream forever. After
+that he has standing, such as no man may have with us for more than that
+psychological moment, when all the papers cry him up, and then everybody
+tries to forget him. But, better than this, the dream has the effect, if
+it has not the fact, of securing every man in his place, so long as
+he keeps to it. Nowhere else in the world is there so much personal
+independence, without aggression, as in England. There is apparently
+nothing of it in Germany; in Italy, every one is so courteous and kind
+that there is no question of it; in the French Republic and in our own,
+it exists in an excess that is molestive and invasive; in England alone
+does it strike the observer as being of exactly the just measure.
+
+Very likely the observer is mistaken, and in the present case he will
+not insist. After all, even the surface indications in such matters are
+slight and few. But what I noted was that, though the simple and humble
+have to go to the wall, and for the most part go to it unkicking, in
+England they were, on their level, respectfully and patiently entreated.
+At a railroad junction one evening, when there was a great hurrying up
+stairs and down, and a mad seeking of wrong trains by right people, the
+company's servants who were taking tickets, and directing passengers
+this way and that, were patiently kind with futile old men and women,
+who came up, in the midst of their torment, and pestered them with
+questions as to the time when trains that had not arrived would leave
+after they did arrive. I shuddered to think what would have at least
+verbally happened to such inquirers with us; but, there, not only their
+lives but their feelings were safe, and they could go away with such
+self-respect as they had quite intact.
+
+
+V
+
+In no country less good-hearted than England could anything so
+wrong-headed as the English baggage system be suffered. But, there,
+passengers of all kinds help the porters to sort their trunks from other
+people's trunks, on arrival at their stations, and apparently think it
+no hardship. The porters, who do not seem especially inspired persons,
+have a sort of guiding instinct in the matter, and wonderfully seldom
+fail to get the things together for the cab, or to get them off the cab,
+and, duly labelled, into the luggage-van. Once, at a great junction,
+my porter seemed to have missed my train, and after vain but not
+unconsidered appeals to the guard, I had to start without it. At
+the next station, the company telegraphed back at its own cost the
+voluminous message of my anxiety and indignation, and I was assured that
+the next train would bring my valise from Crewe to Edinburgh. When I
+arrived at Edinburgh, I casually mentioned my trouble to a guard whom I
+had not seen before. He asked how the bags were marked, and then he said
+they had come with us. My porter had run with them to my train, but in
+despair of getting to my car with his burden, had put them into the
+last luggage-van, and all I had to do was now to identify them at my
+journey's end.
+
+Why one does not, guiltily or guiltlessly, claim other people's baggage,
+I do not know; but apparently it is not the custom. Perhaps in this, the
+deference for any one within his rights, peculiar to the faery dream,
+operates the security of the respective owners of baggage that could
+otherwise easily be the general prey. While I saw constant regard paid
+for personal rights, I saw only one case in which they were offensively
+asserted. This was in starting from York for London, when we attempted
+to take possession of a compartment we had paid for from the nearest
+junction, in order to make certain of it. We found it in the keeping
+of a gentleman who had turned it from a non-smoking into a smoking
+compartment, and bestrewn it with his cigar ashes. When told by the
+porters that we had engaged the compartment, he refused to stir, and
+said that he had paid for his seat, and he should not leave it till he
+was provided with another. In vain they besought him to consider our
+hard case, in being kept out of our own, and promised him another place
+as good as the one he held. He said that he would not believe it till he
+saw it, and as he would not go to see it, and it could not be brought to
+him, there appeared little chance of our getting rid of him. I thought
+it best to let him and the porters fight it out among themselves. When
+a force of guards appeared, they were equally ineffective against
+the intruder, who could not, or did not, say that he did not know the
+compartment was engaged. Suddenly, for no reason, except that he had
+sufficiently stood, or sat, upon his rights, he rose, and the others
+precipitated themselves upon his hand-baggage, mainly composed of
+fishing-tackle, such as a gentleman carries who has been asked to
+somebody's fishing, and bore it away to another part of the train. They
+left one piece behind, and the porter who came back for it was radiantly
+smiling, as if the struggle had been an agreeable exercise, and he spoke
+of his antagonist without the least exasperation; evidently, he regarded
+him as one who had justly defended himself from corporate aggression;
+his sympathies were with him rather than with us, perhaps because we had
+not so vigorously asserted ourselves.
+
+
+VI
+
+A case in which a personal wrong rather than a personal right was
+offensively asserted, was that of a lady, young and too fair to be so
+unfair, in a crowded train coming from the Doncaster Races to York. She
+had kept a whole first-class compartment to herself, putting her maid
+into the second-class adjoining, and heaping the vacant seats with her
+hand-baggage, which had also overflowed into the corridor. At the time
+the train started she was comforting herself in her luxurious solitude
+with a cup of tea, and she stood up, as if to keep other people out.
+But, after waiting, seven of us, in the corridor, until she should offer
+to admit us, we all swarmed in upon her, and made ourselves indignantly
+at home. When it came to that she offered no protest, but gathered up
+her belongings, and barricaded herself with them. Among the rest there
+was a typewriting-machine, but what manner of young lady she was, or
+whether of the journalistic or the theatrical tribe, has never revealed
+itself to this day. We could not believe that she was very high-born,
+not nearly so high, for instance, as the old lady who helped dispossess
+her, and who, when we ventured the hope that it would not rain on the
+morrow, which was to be St. Leger Day, almost lost the kindness for us
+inspired by some small service, because we had the bad taste to suggest
+such a possibility for so sacred a day.
+
+I never saw people standing in a train, except that once which I have
+already noted, when in a very crowded car in Wales, two women, decent
+elderly persons, got in and were suffered to remain on foot by the young
+men who had comfortable places; no one dreamed, apparently, of offering
+to give up his seat. But, on the other hand, a superior civilization
+is shown in what I may call the manual forbearance of the trolley and
+railway folk, who are so apt to nudge and punch you at home here, when
+they wish your attention. The like happened to me only once in England,
+and that was at Liverpool, where the tram conductor, who laid hands
+on me instead of speaking, had perhaps been corrupted by the unseen
+American influences of a port at which we arrive so abundantly and
+indiscriminately. I did not resent the touch, though it is what every
+one is expected to do, if aggrieved, and every one else does it in
+England. Within his rights, every one is safe; though there may be some
+who have no rights. If there were, I did not see them, and I suppose
+that, as an alien, I might have refused to stand up and uncover when the
+band began playing _God Save the King_, as it did at the end of every
+musical occasion; I might have urged that, being no subject of the King,
+I did not feel bound to join in the general prayer. But that would have
+been churlish, and, where every one had been so civil to me, I did not
+see why I should not be civil to the King, in a small matter. In the
+aggregate indeed, it is not a small matter, and I suppose that the
+stranger always finds the patriotism of a country molestive. Patriotism
+is, at any rate, very disagreeable, with the sole exception of our own,
+which we are constantly wishing to share with other people, especially
+with English people. We spare them none of it, even in their own
+country, and yet many of us object to theirs; I feel that I am myself
+being rather offensive about it, now, at this distance from them. Upon
+the whole, not caring very actively for us, one way or the other, they
+take it amiably; they try to get our point of view, and, as if it were a
+thorn, self-sacrificially press their bosoms against it, in the present
+or recent _entente cordiale_. None of their idiosyncrasies is more
+notable than their patience, their kindness with our divergence from
+them; but I am not sure that, having borne with us when we are by, they
+do not take it out of us when we are away.
+
+We are the poetry of a few, who, we like to think, have studied the
+most deeply into the causes of our being, or its excuses. But you cannot
+always be enjoying poetry, and I could well imagine that our lovers must
+sometimes prefer to shut the page. The common gentleness comes from the
+common indifference, and from something else that I will not directly
+touch upon. What is certain is that, with all manner of strangers,
+the English seem very gentle, when they meet in chance encounter. The
+average level of good manners is high. My experience was not the widest,
+and I am always owning it was not deep; but, such as it was, it brought
+me to the distasteful conviction that in England I did not see the
+mannerless uncouthness which I often see in America, not so often from
+high to low, or from old to young, but the reverse. There may be much
+more than we infer, at the moment, from the modulated voices, which
+sweetens casual intercourse, but there are certain terms of respect,
+almost unknown to us, which more obviously do that effect. It is a pity
+that democracy, being the fine thing it essentially is, should behave
+so rudely. Must we come to family government, in order to be filial or
+fraternal in our bearing with one another? Why should we be so blunt, so
+sharp, so ironical, so brutal in our kindness?
+
+
+VII
+
+The single-mindedness of the English is beautiful. It may not help to
+the instant understanding of our jokes; but then, even we are not always
+joking, and it does help to put us at rest and to make us feel safe. The
+Englishman may not always tell the truth, but he makes us feel that we
+are not so sincere as he; perhaps there are many sorts of sincerity. But
+there is something almost caressing in the kindly pause that precedes
+his perception of your meaning, and this is very pleasing after the
+sense of always having your hearer instantly onto you. When, by a chance
+indefinitely rarer than it is with us at home, one meets an Irishman in
+England, or better still an Irishwoman, there is an instant lift of the
+spirit; and, when one passes the Scotch border, there is so much lift
+that, on returning, one sinks back into the embrace of the English
+temperament, with a sigh for the comfort of its soft unhurried
+expectation that there is really something in what you say which, will
+be clear by-and-by.
+
+Having said so much as this in compliance with the frequent American
+pretence that the English are without humor, I wish to hedge in the
+interest of truth. They certainly are not so constantly joking as we; it
+does not apparently seem to them that fate can be propitiated by a habit
+of pleasantry, or that this is so merry a world that one need go about
+grinning in it. Perhaps the conditions with most of them are harder than
+the conditions with most of us. But, thinking of certain Englishmen
+I have known, I should be ashamed to join in the cry of those
+story-telling Americans whose jokes have sometimes fallen effectless.
+It is true that, wherever the Celt has leavened the doughier Anglo-Saxon
+lump, the expectation of a humorous sympathy is greater; but there are
+subtile spirits of Teutonic origin whose fineness we cannot deny, whose
+delicate gayety is of a sort which may well leave ours impeaching itself
+of a heavier and grosser fibre.
+
+No doubt you must sometimes, and possibly oftenest, go more than
+half-way for the response to your humorous intention. Those subtile
+spirits are shy, and may not offer it an effusive welcome. They are
+also of such an exquisite honesty that, if they do not think your wit
+is funny, they will not smile at it, and this may grieve some of our
+jokers. But, if you have something fine and good in you, you need not be
+afraid they will fail of it, and they will not be so long about finding
+it out as some travellers say. When it comes to the grace of the
+imaginative in your pleasantry, they will be even beforehand with you.
+But in their extreme of impersonality they will leave the initiative to
+you in the matter of humor as in others. They will no more seek out your
+peculiar humor than they will name you in speaking with you.
+
+
+VIII
+
+Nothing in England seeks you out, except the damp. Your impressions, you
+have to fight for them. What you see or hear seems of accident. The sort
+of people you have read of your whole life, and are most intimate with
+in fiction, you must surprise. They no more court observance than the
+birds in whose seasonable slaughter society from the King down delights.
+In fact, it is probable that, if you looked for both, you would find the
+gunner shyer than the gunned. The pheasant and the fox are bred to give
+pleasure by their chase; they are tenderly cared for and watched over
+and kept from harm at the hands of all who do not wish to kill them for
+the joy of killing, and they are not so elusive but they can be seen by
+easy chance. The pheasant especially has at times all but the boldness
+of the barnyard in his fearless port. Once from my passing train, I saw
+him standing in the middle of a ploughed field, erect, distinct, like
+a statue of himself, commemorative of the long ages in which his heroic
+death and martyr sufferance have formed the pride of princes and the
+peril of poachers. But I never once saw him shot, though almost as many
+gunners pursue him as there are pheasants in the land. This alone shows
+how shy the gunners are; and when once I saw the trail of a fox-hunt
+from the same coign of vantage without seeing the fox, I felt that I
+had almost indecently come upon the horse and hounds, and that the pink
+coats and the flowery spread of the dappled dogs over the field were
+mine by a kind of sneak as base as killing a fox to save my hens.
+
+
+IX
+
+Equally with the foxes and the pheasants, the royalties and nobilities
+abound in English novels, which really form the chief means of our
+acquaintance with English life; but the chances that reveal them to the
+average unintroduced, unpresented American are rarer. By these chances,
+I heard, out of the whole peerage, but one lord so addressed in public,
+and that was on a railroad platform where a porter was reassuring him
+about his luggage. Similarly, I once saw a lady of quality, a tall and
+girlish she, who stood beside her husband, absently rubbing with her
+glove the window of her motor, and whom but for the kind interest of our
+cabman we might never have known for a duchess. It is by their personal
+uninsistence largely, no doubt, that the monarchy and the aristocracy
+exist; the figures of the faery dream remain blent with the background,
+and appear from it only when required to lay cornerstones, or preside at
+races, or teas or bazars, or to represent the masses at home and abroad,
+and invisibly hold the viewless reins of government.
+
+Yet it must not be supposed that the commoner sort of dreamers are never
+jealous of these figments of their fancy. They are often so, and rouse
+themselves to self-assertion as frequently as our Better Element flings
+off the yoke of Tammany. At a fair, open to any who would pay, for
+some forgotten good object, such as is always engaging the energies
+of society, I saw moving among the paying guests the tall form of a
+nobleman who had somehow made himself so distasteful to his neighbors
+that they were not his friends, and regularly voted down his men,
+whether they stood for Parliament or County Council, and whether they
+were better than the popular choice or not. As a matter of fact, it was
+said that they were really better, but the people would not have them
+because they were his; and one of the theories of English manliness
+is that the constant pressure from above has toughened the spirit and
+enabled Englishmen to stand up stouter and straighter each in his place,
+just as it is contended elsewhere that the aesthetic qualities of the
+human race have been heightened by its stresses and deprivations in the
+struggle of life.
+
+For my own part, I believe neither the one theory nor the other. People
+are the worse for having people above them, and are the ruder and
+coarser for having to fight their way. If the triumph of social
+inequality is such that there are not four men in London who are not
+snobs, it cannot boast itself greater than the success of economic
+inequality with ourselves, among whom the fight for money has not
+produced of late a first-class poet, painter, or sculptor. The English,
+if they are now the manliest people under the sun, have to thank not
+their masters but themselves, and a nature originally so generous that
+no abuse could lastingly wrong it, no political absurdity spoil it. But
+if this nature had been left free from the beginning, we might see now a
+nation of Englishmen who, instead of being bound so hard and fast in
+the bonds of an imperial patriotism, would be the first in a world-wide
+altruism. Yet their patriotism is so devout that it may well pass itself
+off upon them for a religious emotion, instead of the superstition which
+seems to the stranger the implication of an England in the next world as
+well as in this.
+
+
+X
+
+We fancy that, because we have here an Episcopal Church, with its
+hierarchy, we have something equivalent to the English Church. But that
+is a mistake. The English Church is a part of the whole of English life,
+as the army or navy is; in English crowds, the national priest is not so
+frequent as the national soldier, but he is of as marked a quality, and
+as distinct from the civil world, in uniform, bearing, and aspect; in
+the cathedral towns, he and his like form a sort of spiritual garrison.
+At home here you may be ignorant of the feasts of the Episcopal Church
+without shame or inconvenience; but in England you had better be versed
+in the incidence of all the holy days if you would stand well with
+other men, and would know accurately when the changes in the railroad
+time-tables will take place. It will not do to have ascertained the
+limits of Lent; you must be up in the Michaelmases and Whitmondays,
+and the minor saints' days. When once you have mastered this
+difficult science, you will realize what a colossal transaction the
+disestablishment of the English Church in England would be, and how it
+would affect the whole social fabric.
+
+But, even when you have learned your lesson, it will not be to you as
+that knowledge which has been lived, and which has no more need ever
+to question itself than the habitual pronunciation of words. If one has
+moved in good English society, one has no need ever to ask how a word is
+pronounced, far less to go to the dictionary; one pronounces it as one
+has always heard it pronounced. The sense of this gives the American a
+sort of despair, like that of a German or French speaking foreigner, who
+perceives that he never will be able to speak English. The American is
+rather worse off, for he has to subdue an inward rebellion, and to form
+even the wish to pronounce some English words as the English do. He
+has, for example, always said "financier," with the accent on the last
+syllable; and if he has consulted his Webster he has found that there
+was no choice for him. Then, when he hears it pronounced at Oxford by
+the head of a college with the accent on the second syllable, and learns
+on asking that it is never otherwise accented in England, his head
+whirls a little, and he has a sick moment, in which he thinks he had
+better let the verb "to be" govern the accusative as the English do,
+and be done with it, or else telegraph for his passage home at once. Or
+stop! He must not "telegraph," he must "wire."
+
+
+XI
+
+As for that breathing in the wrong place which is known as dropping
+one's aitches, I found that in the long time between the first and last
+of my English sojourns, there had arisen the theory that it was a vice
+purely cockney in origin, and that it had grown upon the nation through
+the National Schools. It is grossly believed, or boldly pretended, that
+till the National School teachers had conformed to the London standard
+in their pronunciation the wrong breathing was almost unknown in
+England, but that now it was heard everywhere south of the Scottish
+border. Worse yet, the teachers in the National Schools had scattered
+far and wide that peculiar intonation, that droll slip or twist of the
+vowel sounds by which the cockney alone formerly proclaimed his low
+breeding, and the infection is now spread as far as popular learning.
+Like the wrong breathing, it is social death "to any he that utters it,"
+not indeed that swift extinction which follows having your name crossed
+by royalty from the list of guests at a house where royalty is about to
+visit, but a slow, insidious malady, which preys upon its victim, and
+finally destroys him after his life-long struggle to shake it off. It is
+even worse than the wrong breathing, and is destined to sweep the whole
+island, where you can nowhere, even now, be quite safe from hearing
+a woman call herself "a lydy." It may indeed be the contagion of the
+National School teacher, but I feel quite sure, from long observation of
+the wrong breathing, that the wrong breathing did not spread from London
+through the schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of
+the unbred in England as nasality is with us. Both infirmities are of
+national origin and extent, and both are individual or personal in their
+manifestation. That is, some Americans in every part of the Union talk
+through their noses; some Englishmen in every part of the kingdom drop
+their aitches.
+
+The English-speaking Welsh often drop their aitches, as the
+English-speaking French do, though the Scotch and Irish never drop them,
+any more than the Americans, or the English of the second generation
+among us; but the extremely interesting and great little people of Wales
+are otherwise as unlike the English as their mother-language is. They
+seem capable of doing anything but standing six feet in their stockings,
+which is such a very common achievement with the English, but that is
+the fault of nature which gave them dark complexions and the English
+fair. Where the work of the spirit comes in, it effects such a
+difference between the two peoples as lies between an Eisteddfod and a
+horse-race. While all the singers of Wales met in artistic emulation at
+their national musical festival at Rhyl, all the gamblers of England met
+in the national pastime of playing the horses at Doncaster. More money
+probably changed hands on the events at Doncaster than at Rhyl, and it
+was characteristic of the prevalent influence in the common civilization
+(if there is a civilization common to both races) that the King was at
+Doncaster and not at Rhyl. But I do not say this to his disadvantage,
+for I was myself at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. You cannot, unless
+you have a very practised ear, say which is the finer singer at an
+Eisteddfod, but almost any one can see which horse comes in first at a
+race.
+
+
+XII
+
+What is most striking in the mixture of strains in England is that it
+apparently has not ultimately mixed them; and perhaps after a thousand
+years the racial traits will be found marking Americans as persistently.
+We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be assimilating, the different
+voluntary and involuntary immigrations; but doubtless after two thousand
+years the African, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Gaul,
+the Hun, the Latin, the Slav will be found atavistically asserting his
+origin in certain of their common posterity. The Pennsylvania Germans
+have as stolidly maintained their identity for two centuries as the
+Welsh in Great Britain for twenty, or, so far as history knows, from
+the beginning of time. The prejudices of one British stock concerning
+another are as lively as ever, apparently, however the enmities may
+have worn themselves away. One need not record any of these English
+prejudices concerning the Scotch or Irish; they are too well known; but
+I may set down the opinion of a lively companion in a railroad journey
+that the Welsh are "the prize liars of the universe." He was an expert
+accountant by profession, and his affairs took him everywhere in the
+three Kingdoms, and this was his settled error; for the Welsh themselves
+know that, if they sometimes seem the prey of a lively imagination, it
+is the philologically noted fault of their language, which refuses to
+lend itself to the accurate expression of fact, but which would probably
+afford them terms for pronouncing the statement of my accountant
+inexact. He was perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions,
+for, though he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests,
+there were things that had never appealed to him. We praised together
+the lovely September landscape through which we were running, and I
+ventured some remark upon the large holdings of the land: a thing that
+always saddened me in the face of nature with the reflection that those
+who tilled the soil owned none of it; though I ought to have remembered
+the times when the soil owned them, and taken heart. My notion seemed to
+strike him for the first time, but he dismissed the fact as a necessary
+part of the English system; it had never occurred to him that there
+could be question of that system. There must be many Englishmen to whom
+it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet them you cannot blame
+the others.
+
+I fancied that one of the Englishmen to whom it might have occurred was
+he whom I met in Wales at Aberystwyth, where we spoke together a moment
+in the shadow of the co-educational University there, and who seemed at
+least of a different mind concerning the Welsh. "These Welsh farmers,"
+he said, "send their sons and daughters to college as if it were quite
+the natural thing to do. But just imagine a Dorsetshire peasant sending
+his boy to a University!"
+
+We suppose that the large holdings of land are the effect of wrongs and
+abuses now wholly in the past, and that the causes for their increase
+are no longer operative, but are something like those geological laws by
+which the strata under them formed themselves. Once, however, in driving
+through the most beautiful part of England, which I will not specify
+because every part of England is the most beautiful, I came upon an
+illustration of the reverse, as signal as the spectacle of a landslide.
+It was the accumulation, not merely within men's memories, but within
+the actual generation, of vast bodies of land in the hold of a great
+nobleman who had contrived a title in them by the simple device of
+enclosing the people's commons. It was a wrong, but there was no one of
+the wronged who was brave enough or rich enough to dispute it through
+the broken law, and no witness public-spirited enough to come to
+their aid. Such things make us think patiently, almost proudly, of
+our national foible of graft, which may really be of feudal origin.
+Doubtless the aggression was attacked in the press, but we all know
+what the attacks of the press amount to against the steadfast will of
+a powerful corporation, and a great nobleman in England is a powerful
+corporation. In this instance he had not apparently taken the people's
+land without some wish to make them a return for it. He had built a
+handsome road through their property, which he maintained in splendid
+condition, and he allowed them to drive over his road, and to walk
+freely in certain portions of their woods. He had also built a
+magnificent hospital for them, and it seemed rather hard, then, to
+hear that one of the humblest of them had been known to speak of him in
+whispered confidence as a "Upas tree."
+
+
+XIII
+
+Probably he was not personally a Upas tree, probably the rancor toward
+him left from being bawled after by one of his gatemen at a turning we
+had taken in his enclosure, "That's a private path!" was unjust. There
+was no sign, such as everywhere in England renders a place secure from
+intrusion. The word "Private" painted up anywhere does the effect of
+bolts and bars and of all obsolete man-traps beyond it, and is not for a
+moment that challenge to the wayfaring foot which it seems so often
+with us; but the warnings to the public which we make so mandatory, the
+English language with unfailing gentleness. You are not told to keep
+your foot or your wheel to a certain pathway; you are "requested,"
+and sometimes even "kindly requested"; I do not know but once I was
+"respectfully requested." Perhaps that nobleman's possession of these
+lands was so new that his retainers had to practise something of
+unwonted rudeness in keeping it wholly his where he chose. At any rate,
+the rule of civility is so universal that the politeness from class to
+class is, for what the stranger sees, all but unfailing. I dare say he
+does not see everything, even the Argus-eyed American, but apparently
+the manners of the lower class, where they have been touched by the
+upper, have been softened and polished to the same consistence
+and complexion. When it comes to the proffers, and refusals, and
+insistences, and acceptances between people of condition, such as I
+witnessed once in a crowded first-class carriage from London on an
+Oxford holiday, nothing could be more gently urgent, more beautifully
+forbearing. If the writers of our romantic novels could get just those
+manners into their fiction, I should not mind their dealing so much with
+the English nobility and gentry; for those who intend being our
+nobility and gentry, by-and-by, could not do better than study such
+high-breeding.
+
+If we approach the morals of either superiors or inferiors, we are in
+a region where it behooves us to tread carefully. To be honest, I know
+nothing about them, and I will not assume to know anything. I heard from
+authority which I could not suspect of posing for omniscience that the
+English rustics were apt to be very depraved, but they may on the
+other hand be saints for all that I can prove against them. They are
+superstitious, it is said, and there are few villages or old houses
+that have not their tutelary spectres. The belief in ghosts is almost
+universal among the people; as I may allow without superiority, for I
+do not know but I believe in them myself, and there are some million of
+American spiritualists who make an open profession of faith in them. It
+is said also that the poor in England are much spoiled by the constant
+aid given them in charity. This is supposed to corrupt them, and to
+make them dependent upon the favors of fortune, rather than the sweat of
+their brows. On the other hand, they often cannot get work, as I infer
+from the armies of the unemployed, and, in these cases, I cannot hold
+them greatly to blame if they bless their givers by their readiness
+to receive. If one may infer from the incessant beneficences, and the
+constant demands for more and more charities, one heaped upon another,
+there are more good objects in England than anywhere else under the sun,
+for one only gives to good objects, of course. The oppression of the
+subscriptions is tempered by the smallness of the sum which may satisfy
+them. "Five shillings is a subscription," said a friend who was accused
+of really always giving five pounds.
+
+
+XIV
+
+The English rich do not give so spectacularly as our rich do--that
+is, by handfuls of millions, but then the whole community gives more, I
+think, than our community does, and when it does not give, the necessary
+succor is taxed out of its incomes and legacies. I do not mean that
+there is no destitution, but only that the better off seem to have the
+worse off more universally and perpetually in mind than with us. All
+this is believed to be very demoralizing to the poor, and doubtless the
+certainty of soup and flannel is bad for the soul of an old woman whose
+body is doubled up with rheumatism. The Church seems to blame for
+much of the evil that ensues from giving something to people who have
+nothing; but I dare say the Dissenters are also guilty.
+
+Just how much is wanted to stay the stomach of a healthy pauper, it
+would be hard to say; but now and then the wayfarer gets some hint of
+the frequency if not the amount of feeding among the poor who are able
+to feed themselves. One day, in the outskirts--they were very tattered
+and draggled--of Liverpool, we stopped at a pastry-shop, where the kind
+woman "thought she could accommodate" us with a cup of tea, though she
+was terribly pressed with custom from all sorts of minute maids and
+small boys coming in for "penn'orths" of that frightful variety of tart
+and cake which dismays the beholder from innumerable shop windows
+in England. When we were brought our safer refection, we noted her
+activities to the hostess, and she said, "Yes, they all want a bit
+of cake with their tea, even the poorest"; and when we ventured our
+supposition that they made their afternoon tea the last meal of the day,
+she laughed at the notion. "Last meal! They have a good supper before
+they go to bed. Indeed, they all want their four meals a day."
+
+Another time, thriftily running in a third-class carriage from Crewe to
+Chester, I was joined by a friendly man who addressed me with the frank
+cordiality of the lower classes in recognizing one of their sort. "They
+don't know how to charge!" he said, with an irony that referred to the
+fourpence he had been obliged to pay for a cup of station tea; and when
+I tried to allege some mitigating facts in behalf of the company, he
+readily became autobiographical. The transition from tea to eating
+generally was easy, and he told me that he was a plumber, going to do a
+job of work at Llandudno, where he had to pay fourteen bob, which I
+knew to be shillings and mentally translated into $3.50, a week for
+his board. His wages were $1.50 a day, which the reader who multiplies
+fourpence by twenty, to make up the difference in money values, will
+find to be the wages of a good mechanic in the first Edward's time, five
+hundred years ago. On this he professed to live very well. He rose
+every morning at half-past four, and at six he had a breakfast of bread,
+butter, and coffee; at nine he had porridge and coffee; at one, he had
+soup, meat, and eggs, and perhaps beer; at night, after he got home from
+work, he had a stew and a bit of meat, and perhaps beer, with Mother. He
+thought that English people ate too much, generally, and especially
+on Sunday, when they had nothing else to do. Most men never came home
+without asking, "Well, Mother, what have you got for me to eat now?"
+When I remembered how sparely our farm people and mechanics fared, I
+thought that he was right, or they were wrong; for the puzzling fact
+remained that they looked gaunt and dyspeptic, and he hale and fresh,
+though the difference may have had as much to do with the air as the
+food. I liked him, and I cannot leave him without noting that he was of
+the lean-faced, slightly aquiline British type, with a light mustache;
+he was well dressed and well set up, and he spoke strongly, as North
+Britons do, with nothing of our people's husky whine. I found him on
+further acquaintance of anti-Chamberlain politics, pro-Boer as to
+the late war, and rather socialistic. He blamed the labor men for
+not choosing labor men to office instead of the gentry who offered
+themselves. He belonged to a plumbers' union, and he had nothing to
+complain of, but he inferred that the working-man was better off in
+America, from the fact that none of his friends who had gone to the
+States ever came home to stay, though they nearly all came home for
+a holiday, sooner or later. He differed from my other friend, the
+accountant, in being very fond of the Welsh; it must be owned their race
+seemed to have acquired merit with him through the tip of two sovereigns
+which his last employer in Llandudno had given him. On the other hand,
+he had no love for the Italians who were coming in, especially at
+Glasgow. In Glasgow, he said, there were more drunken women than
+anywhere else in the world, though there was no public-house drinking
+with them as in London. This, so far as I got at it, formed his outlook
+on life, but I dare say there was more of it.
+
+
+XV
+
+I was always regretting that I got at the people so little, and that
+only chance hints of what they were thinking and feeling reached me.
+Now and then, a native observer said something about them which
+seemed luminous. "We are frightfully feudal," such an observer said,
+"especially the poor." He did not think it a fault, I believe, and only
+used his adverb intensifyingly, for he was of a Tory mind. He meant the
+poor among the country people, who have at last mastered that principle
+of the feudal system which early enabled the great nobles to pay nothing
+for the benefits they enjoyed from it. But my other friend, the plumber,
+was not the least feudal, or not so feudal as many a lowly ward-heeler
+in New York, who helps to make up the muster of some captain of
+politics, under the lead of a common boss. The texture of society, in
+the smarter sense, the narrower sense, is what I could not venture to
+speak of more confidently. Once I asked a friend, a very dear and valued
+friend, whether a man's origin or occupation would make any difference
+in his social acceptance, if he were otherwise interesting and
+important. He seemed not to know what I would be at, and, when he
+understood, he responded with almost a shout of amazement, "Oh, not the
+least in the world!" But I have my doubts still; and I should say that
+it might be as difficult for a very cultivated and agreeable man servant
+to get on in London society, as for an artist or poet to feel at home
+in the first circles of New York. Possibly, however, London society,
+because of its almost immeasurable vastness, can take in more of more
+sorts of people, without the consciousness of differences which keeps
+our own first circles so elect. I venture, somewhat wildly, somewhat
+unwarrantably, the belief that English society is less sensitive to
+moral differences than ours, and that people with their little _taches_
+would find less anxiety in London than in New York lest they should come
+off on the people they rubbed against. Some Americans, who, even with
+our increasing prevalence of divorces, are not well seen at home, are
+cheerfully welcomed in England.
+
+Perhaps, there, all Americans, good and bad, high and low, coarse and
+fine, are the same to senses not accustomed to our varying textures
+and shades of color; that is a matter I should be glad to remand to the
+psychologist, who will have work enough to do if he comes to inquire
+into such mysteries. One can never be certain just how the English take
+us, or how much, or whether they take us at all. Oftenest I was inclined
+to think that we were imperceptible to them, or that, when we were
+perceptible, they were aware of us as Swedenborg says the most celestial
+angels are aware of evil spirits, merely as something angular. Americans
+were distressful to their consciousness, they did not know why; and
+then they tried to ignore us. But perhaps this is putting it a little
+fantastically. What I know is that one comes increasingly to reserve the
+fact of one's nationality, when it is not essential to the occasion, and
+to become as much as possible an unknown quality, rather than a quality
+aggressive or positive. Sometimes, when I could feel certain of my
+ground, I ventured my conviction that Englishmen were not so much
+interested in Americans as those Americans who stayed at home were apt
+to think; but when I once expressed this belief to a Unitarian minister,
+whom I met in the West of England, he received it with surprise and
+refusal. He said that in his own immediate circle, at least, his friends
+were interested and increasingly interested in America, what she was
+and what she meant to be, and still looked toward her for the lead
+in certain high things which Englishmen have ceased to expect of
+themselves. My impression is that most of the most forward of the
+English Sociologists regard America as a back number in those political
+economics which imply equality as well as liberty in the future. They do
+not see any difference between our conditions and theirs, as regards
+the man who works for his living with his hands, except that wages are
+higher with us, and that physically there is more elbow-room, though
+mentally and morally there is not. Save a little in my Unitarian
+minister, and this only conjecturally, I did not encounter that fine
+spirit which in Old England used to imagine the New World we have not
+quite turned out to be; but once I met an Englishman who had lived
+in Canada, and who, gentleman-bred as he was, looked back with fond
+homesickness to the woods where he had taken up land, and built himself
+a personable house, chiefly with his own hands. He had lived himself out
+of touch with his old English life in that new country, and had drawn
+breath in an opener and livelier air which filled his lungs as the home
+atmosphere never could again.
+
+
+XVI
+
+Yet he was standing stiffly up for himself, and strewing his
+convictions and opinions broadcast as the English all do when pressed
+by circumstance, while we, with none of their shyness, mostly think our
+thoughts to ourselves. I suppose we do it because we like better than
+they to seem of one effect with the rest of our kind. In England one
+sees a variety of dress in men which one rarely sees at home. They dress
+there not only in keeping with their work and their play, but in the
+indulgence of any freak of personal fancy, so that in the street of a
+provincial town, like Bath, for instance, you will encounter in a short
+walk a greater range of trousers, leggings, caps, hats, coats, jackets,
+collars, scarfs, boots and shoes, of tan and black, than you would meet
+at home in a month of Sundays. The differences do not go to the length
+of fashions, such as reduce our differences to uniformity, and clothe,
+say, our legs in knickerbockers till it is found everybody is wearing
+them, when immediately nobody wears them. Only ladies, of fashions
+beyond men's, gratify caprices like ours, and even these perhaps not
+voluntarily. In the obedience they show to the rule that they must never
+wear the same dinner or ball gown twice, it was said (but who can ever
+find out the truth of such things?) that they sometimes had sent home
+from the dressmaker's a number of dresses on liking, and wore them in
+succession, only to return them, all but one at least, as not liked, the
+dressmaker having found her account in her work being shown in society.
+
+[Illustration: AN ENGLISH HOUSEMAID]
+
+I do not know just what is to be inferred from a social fact or
+statement like this, but I may say that the devotion to an ideal of
+social position is far deeper with the English than with us. Whether
+we spend more or not, I believe that the English live much nearer their
+incomes than Americans do. I think that we save more out of our
+earnings than they out of theirs, and that in this we are more like the
+Continental peoples, the French or the Italians. They spend vastly more
+on state than we do, because, for one thing, they have more state to
+spend on. A man may continue to make money in America, and not change
+his manner of living till he chooses, and he may never change it. Such
+a thing could not happen to an Englishwoman as happened to the elderly
+American housewife who walked through the magnificent house which her
+husband had bought to surprise her, and sighed out at last, "Well, now I
+suppose I shall have to keep a girl!" The girl would have been kept
+from the beginning of her husband's prosperity, and multiplied, till
+the house was full of servants. If you have the means of a gentleman
+in England, you must live like a gentleman, apparently; you cannot live
+plainly, and put by, and largely you must trust to your life-insurance
+as the fortune you will leave your heirs. It cannot be denied that the
+more generous expenditure of the English adds to the grace of life, and
+that they are more hospitable according to their means than we are; or
+than those Continental peoples who are not hospitable at all.
+
+A thing that one feels more and more irritatingly in England is that,
+while with other foreigners we stand on common ground, where we may be
+as unlike them as we choose, with the English we always stand on English
+ground, where we can differ only at our peril, and to our disadvantage.
+A person speaking English and bearing an English name, had better be
+English, for if he cannot it shows, it proves, that there is something
+wrong in him. Our misfortune is that our tradition, and perhaps our
+inclination, obliges us to be un-English, whereas we do not trouble
+ourselves to be un-French, or un-Italian, for we are so by nature. The
+effort involved in distinguishing ourselves breeds a sort of annoyance,
+or call it no more than uneasiness, which is almost as bad as a bad
+conscience; and in our sense of hopeless perdition we turn vindictively
+upon our judge. But that is not fair and it is not wise; he does not
+mean to be our judge, except when he comes to us for the purpose; in his
+own house, he is civilly unaware of putting us to any test whatever. If
+you ask him whether he likes this thing or that of ours, he will tell
+you frankly; he never can see why he should not be frank; he has a kind
+of helplessness in always speaking the truth; and he does not try to
+make it palatable.
+
+
+XVII
+
+An English Radical, who would say of his King no more than that he was
+a good little man, and most useful in promoting friendship with France,
+was inclined to blame us because we did not stay by at the time of our
+Revolution, and help them fight out as Englishmen the fight for English
+freedom. He had none of the loyalty of sentiment which so mystifies the
+American, but plenty of the loyalty of reason, and expected a Utopia
+which should not be of political but of economical cast. But one was
+always coming upon illustrations of the loyalty of sentiment with
+which of course one could have no quarrel, for their patriotism seldom
+concerned us, except rather handsomely to include us. The French have
+ceased to be the hereditary enemy, and the Russians have now taken their
+place in the popular patriotism. I always talked with the lower classes
+when I could, perhaps because I felt myself near them in my unworthy
+way, and one evening in a grassy lane I made the acquaintance of a
+friendly man letting his horse browse the wayside turf. He was in the
+livery-stable line, but he had been a soldier many years. Upon this
+episode he became freely autobiographical, especially concerning his
+service in India. He volunteered the declaration that he had had enough
+of war, but he added, thoughtfully, "I should like to go out for a
+couple of years if there was any trouble with Russia."
+
+The love of England comes out charmingly in the swarming of English
+tourists in every part of their country. Americans may sometimes
+outnumber them at the Continental shrines, but we are in a pitiful
+minority at the memorable places in England; in fact, we are nowhere
+beside the natives. I liked their fondness for their own so much that
+I never could feel the fine scorn for "trippers" which I believe all
+persons of condition ought to assume. Even when the trippers did
+not seem very intelligently interested in what they saw, they were
+harmlessly employed, for a scene of beauty, or of historic appeal, could
+not be desecrated by the courtships which are constantly going on all
+over England, especially at the holiday seasons.
+
+The English are, indeed, great holiday-makers, even when past the age
+of putting their arms around one another's waists. The many and many
+seaside resorts form the place of their favorite outings, where they try
+to spend such days and weeks of the late summer as their savings will
+pay for. It is said that families in very humble station save the year
+round for these vacations, and, having put by twelve or fifteen pounds,
+repair to some such waterside as Blackpool, or its analogue in their
+neighborhood, and lavish them upon the brief joy of the time. They
+take the cheaper lodgings, and bring with them the less perishable
+provisions, and lead a life of resolute gayety on the sands and in the
+sea, and at the pier-ends where the negro minstrels and the Pierrots,
+who equally abound, make the afternoons and evenings a delight which no
+one would suspect from their faces to be the wild thing it is. If they
+go home at the end "high sorrowful and cloyed," there is no forecast of
+it in their demeanor, which is as little troubled as it is animated.
+The young people are even openly gay, and the robustness of their
+flirtations adds sensibly to the interest of the spectator. Our own
+public lovers seem of a humbler sort, and they mostly content themselves
+with the passive embraces of which every seat in our parks affords an
+example; but in England such lovers add playful struggles. A favorite
+pastime seemed to be for one of them to hold something in the hand, and
+for the other to try prying it open. When it was the young man who kept
+his hand shut, the struggle could go on almost indefinitely. I suppose
+it led to many engagements and marriages.
+
+When the young people were not walking up and down, or playfully
+scuffling, they were reading novels; in fact, I do not imagine that
+anywhere else in the world is there a half, or a tenth part, so much
+fiction consumed as in the English summer resorts. It is probably of the
+innutritious lightness of pop-corn; I had never the courage to look at
+the volumes which I could so easily have overlooked; but I am sure it
+was all out of the circulating library. As there were often several
+young women to one man, most of the girls had to content themselves
+with the flirtations in the books, where, I dare say, the heroines
+were always prying the heroes' hands open. On every seat one found them
+poring upon the glowing page, and met them in every walk with a volume
+under the arm, and another clasped to the heart. At places where the
+hand played, and they were ostensibly listening to the music, they were
+bowed upon their books, and the flutter of the turning leaves almost
+silenced the blare of the horns. By what inspiration they knew when _God
+Save the King_ was coming, and rose with a long sigh heaved in common,
+I should not be able to say. Perhaps they always reached the end of a
+story at the time the band came to that closing number, or perhaps they
+felt its imminence in their nerves. The fiction was not confined to the
+young girls, however. Both sexes and all ages partook of it; I saw as
+many old girls as young girls reading novels, and mothers of families
+were apparently as much addicted to the indulgence. I suppose they put
+by their books when they took tea, which is the other most noticeable
+dissipation in England. But I cannot enter upon that chapter; it is
+too large a theme; I will say, merely, that as the saloons are on Sixth
+Avenue, so the tearooms are in every part of the island.
+
+[Illustration: LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS]
+
+
+XVIII
+
+It had seemed to me in former visits to England that the Christian
+Sabbath was a more depressing day there than here, but from the last
+I have a more cheerful memory of it. I still felt it dispiriting in
+London, where as many fled from it as could, and where the empty streets
+symbolized a world abandoned to destruction; but this was mainly in the
+forenoon. Even then, the markets and fairs in the avenues given up to
+them were the scenes of an activity which was not without gayety, and
+certainly not without noise; and when the afternoon came, the lower
+classes, such as had remained in town, thronged to the public houses,
+and the upper classes to the evening parade in the Park. As to the
+relative amount of church-going, I will not even assume to be sure; but
+I have a fancy that it is a rite much less rigorous than it used to
+be. Still, in provincial places, I found the churches full on a Sunday
+morning, and all who could afford it hallowed the day by putting on
+a frock-coat and a top-hat, which are not worn outside of London on
+week-days. The women, of course, were always in their best on Sunday.
+Perhaps in the very country the upper classes go to church as much as
+formerly, but I have my doubts whether they feel so much obliged to it
+in conformity to usage, or for the sake of example to their inferiors.
+Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there are pretty
+well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive spectacle, and one
+could imagine people resorting to its functions for aesthetic reasons.
+
+But, in these guesses, one must remember that the English who remained
+at home were never Puritanized, never in such measure personally
+conscienced, as those who came to America in the times of the successive
+Protestant fervors; and that is a thing which we are apt to forget. The
+home-keeping English continued, with changes of ritual, much like the
+peoples who still acknowledged as their head "the Bishop of Rome."
+Their greater morality, if it was greater, was temperamental rather than
+spiritual, and, leaving the church to look after religion much more than
+our Puritans did, they kept a simplicity of nature impossible to the
+sectaries always taking stock of their souls. In fact, the Calvinists
+of New England were almost essentially different from the Calvinists of
+Holland, of France, even of Scotland. If our ancestors were the children
+of light, as they trusted, they were darkened by the forest, into which
+they plunged, to certain reasons which the children of darkness, as the
+Puritans believed the non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers
+from the world about them. There is no denying that with certain great
+gains, the American Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincialized,
+and that if they lived in the spirit, they lived in it narrowly, while
+the others, who lived in the body, lived in it liberally, or at any rate
+handsomely. From our narrowness we flattered ourselves that we were able
+to imagine a life more broadly based than theirs, or at least a life
+from which theirs must look insufficient and unfinal, so long as man
+feels within himself the prompting to be something better or higher than
+he is. Yet the English life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery
+dream of a king supported in his preeminence by a nobility, a nobility
+supported in turn by a commonalty, a commonalty supported again by a
+proletariat resting upon immeasurable ether; with a system of government
+kept, by assent so general that the dissent does not matter, in the
+hands of a few families reared, if not trained, to power; with a society
+so intimately and thoroughly self-acquainted that one touch of gossip
+makes its whole world kin, and responsive to a single emotion; with a
+charity so wisely studied, and so carefully applied, that restive misery
+never quite grows rebellious; with a patriotism so inborn and ingrained
+that all things English seem righteous because English; with a
+willingness to share the general well-being quite to the verge, but
+never beyond the verge, of public control of the administration--with
+all this, the thing must strike the unbelieving observer as desperately
+perfect. "They have got it down cold," he must say to himself, and
+confirm himself in his unfaith by reflecting that it is very cold.
+
+
+XIX
+
+The best observer of England that ever was, he whose book about the
+English makes all other comment seem idle and superfluous palaver, that
+Ralph Waldo Emerson whom we always find ahead of us when we look back
+for him, was once, as he relates in a closing chapter of English Traits,
+brought to bay by certain great English friends of his, who challenged
+him to say whether there really were any Americans with an American
+idea, and a theory of our future. "Thus challenged, I bethought myself
+neither of Congress, neither of President nor of Cabinet Ministers, nor
+of such as would make of America another Europe.... I opened the dogma
+of no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and
+the fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, It is true that
+I have never yet seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand
+for this truth, and yet ... 'tis certain, as God liveth, the gun that
+does not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect
+a clean revolution.... I insisted ... that the manifest absurdity of
+the view to English feasibility could make no difference to a gentleman;
+that as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and spinach in London
+or in Boston, the soul might quote Talleyrand, '_Messieurs, je n'en
+vois pas la necessite_.'" In other words, Emerson laid before his
+great English friends a programme, as nearly as might then be, of
+philosophical anarchism, and naturally it met with no more acceptance
+than it would if now presented to the most respectable of his American
+readers. Yet it is never to be forgotten that it was the English who,
+with all their weight of feudal tradition, and amidst the nightmares to
+which their faery dream seemed so long subject, invented the only form
+of Democratic Christianity the world has yet known, unless indeed the
+German Mennonites are the same as the earlier English Quakers were in
+creed and life. In the pseudo-republic of the Cromwellian commonwealth
+the English had a state as wholly without liberty, equality, and
+fraternity as in the king-capped oligarchy they had before and have
+had ever since. We may be sure that they will never have such another
+commonwealth, or any resembling ours, which can no longer offer itself
+as an eminent example.
+
+The sort of Englishmen, of whose respect Americans can make surest are
+those English thick-and-thin patriots who admire force and strength, and
+believe that it is the Anglo-Saxon mission to possess the earth, and
+to profit by its weaker peoples, not cruelly, not unkindly, yet
+unquestionably. The Englishmen of whose disrespect we can make surest
+are those who expect to achieve liberty, equality, and fraternity in the
+economic way, the political way having failed; who do not care whether
+the head of the state is born or elected, is called "King" or called
+"President," since he will presently not be at all; who abhor war, and
+believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and these only if they
+work for a living. They have already had their will with the existing
+English state, until now that state is far more the servant of the
+people in fetching and carrying, in guarding them from hard masters
+and succoring them in their need, than the republic which professes
+to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. When one
+encounters this sort of Englishman, one thinks silently of the child
+labor in the South, of the monopolies in the North, of the companies
+which govern while they serve us, and one hopes that the Englishman is
+not silently thinking of them too. He is probably of the lower classes,
+and one consoles one's self as one can by holding one's head higher in
+better company, where, without secret self-contempt, one can be more
+openly proud of our increasing fortunes and our increasing territory,
+and our warlike adequacy to a first position among the nations of
+the world. There is no fear that in such company one's national
+susceptibilities will be wounded, or that one will not be almost as much
+admired for one's money as at home. I do not say quite, because there
+are still things in England even more admired than money. Certainly
+a very rich American would be considered in such English society,
+but certainly he would not be so much considered as an equally rich
+Englishman who was also a duke.
+
+I cannot name a nobleman of less rank, because I will not belittle my
+rich countryman, but perhaps the English would think differently, and
+would look upon him as lower than the latest peer or the newest knight
+of the King's creation. The King, who has no power, can do almost
+anything in England; and his touch, which is no longer sovereign for
+scrofula, can add dignity and give absolute standing to a man whose
+achievements merit it, but who with us would fail of anything like it.
+The English system is more logical than ours, but not so reasonable. The
+English have seen from the beginning inequality and the rule of the few.
+We can hardly prove that we see, in the future, equality and the rule
+of the many. Yet our vision is doubtless prophetic, whatever obliquities
+our frequent astigmatism may impart to it. Meantime, in its ampler range
+there is room for the play of any misgiving short of denial; but the
+English cannot doubt the justice of what they have seen without forming
+an eccentric relation to the actual fact. The Englishman who refuses the
+formal recognition of his distinction by his prince is the anomaly,
+not the Englishman who accepts it. Gladstone who declines a peerage is
+anomalous, not Tennyson who takes it. As part of the English system, as
+a true believer in the oligarchically administered monarchy, Gladstone
+was illogical, and Tennyson was logical.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Seven English Cities, by William Dean Howells
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
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+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      Seven English Cities, by W. D. Howells
+    </title>
+   <link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" />
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
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+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
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+    .side      { float: right; font-size: 75%; width: 25%; padding-left: 0.8em;
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Seven English Cities, by William Dean Howells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Seven English Cities
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+
+Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7187]
+This file was first posted on March 24, 2003
+Last Updated: August 22, 2016
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Tricia Gilbert, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, David Widger
+and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+    <div style="height: 8em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h1>
+      SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES
+    </h1>
+    <h2>
+      By W. D. Howells
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0011}.jpg" alt="{0011}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0011}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0010}.jpg" alt="{0010}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0010}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <b>CONTENTS</b>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> NINE DAYS&rsquo; WONDER IN YORK </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0005"> TWO YORKISH EPISODES </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0006"> A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
+      </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0007"> THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0008"> ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0009"> LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE </a>
+    </p>
+    <p class="toc">
+      <a href="#link2H_4_0010"> GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER </a>
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_ILL" id="link2H_ILL"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ILLUSTRATIONS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> A VIEW OF MONK BAR <br /> ST. GEORGE&rsquo;S HALL, LIVERPOOL
+      <br /> THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL <br /> THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS <br />
+      MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL <br /> TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER <br /> THE MANCHESTER
+      SHIP-CANAL <br /> TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD <br /> YORK MINSTER&mdash;THE
+      GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND <br /> BOOTHAM BAR AND THE MINSTER <br /> WALMGATE
+      BAR HAS A BARBICAN <br /> ST. MARY&rsquo;S ABBEY <br /> CLIFFORD&rsquo;S
+      TOWER <br /> YORK AS SEEN FROM THE RIVER <br /> DURHAM CATHEDRAL&mdash;NORTHWEST
+      VIEW <br /> FINCHALE PRIORY <br /> DURHAM CATHEDRAL&mdash;ITS MATCHLESS SEAT
+      ON THE BLUFFS OF THE RIVER <br /> THE &ldquo;STUMP&rdquo; OF ST. BOTOLPH&rsquo;S
+      CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY <br /> THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OF FANEUIL HALL AND
+      QUINCY MARKET-PLACES <br /> THE RIVER AT EVENING <br /> LIFTING ITS TOWER
+      FROM THE BRINK OF THE WITHAM <br /> FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY <br />
+      THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH <br /> ABERYSTWYTH FROM CRAIG GLAS ROCKS <br />
+      LLANDUDNO&mdash;THE CITY AND HARBOR <br /> LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME&rsquo;S
+      NECK <br /> THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO <br /> CONWAY CASTLE <br /> PLAS MAWR
+      <br /> A PRESENTATION AT COURT <br /> THE ENGLISH HOUSEMAID <br /> LEADS A
+      LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS <br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Why should the proud stomach of American travel, much tossed in the
+      transatlantic voyage, so instantly have itself carried from Liverpool to
+      any point where trains will convey it? Liverpool is most worthy to be seen
+      and known, and no one who looks up from the bacon and eggs of his first
+      hotel breakfast after landing, and finds himself confronted by the
+      coal-smoked Greek architecture of St. George&rsquo;s Hall, can deny that
+      it is of a singularly noble presence. The city has moments of failing in
+      the promise of this classic edifice, but every now and then it reverts to
+      it, and reminds the traveller that he is in a great modern metropolis of
+      commerce by many other noble edifices.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Liverpool does not remind him of this so much as the good and true
+      Baedeker professes, in the dockside run on the overhead railway (as the
+      place unambitiously calls its elevated road); but then, as I noted in my
+      account of Southampton, docks have a fancy of taking themselves in, and
+      eluding the tourist eye, and even when they &ldquo;flank the Mersey for a
+      distance of 6-7 M.&rdquo; they do not respond to American curiosity so
+      frankly as could be wished. They are like other English things in that,
+      however, and it must be said for them that when apparent they are
+      sometimes unimpressive. From my own note-book, indeed, I find that I
+      pretended to think them &ldquo;wonderful and almost endless,&rdquo; and so
+      I dare say they are. But they formed only a very perfunctory interest of
+      our day at Liverpool, where we had come to meet, not to take, a steamer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our run from London, in the heart of June, was very quick and pleasant,
+      through a neat country and many tidy towns. In the meadows the elms seemed
+      to droop like our own rather than to hold themselves oakenly upright like
+      the English; the cattle stood about in the yellow buttercups, knee-deep,
+      white American daisies, and red clover, and among the sheep we had our
+      choice of shorn and unshorn; they were equally abundant. Some of the
+      blossomy May was left yet on the hawthorns, and over all the sky hovered,
+      with pale-white clouds in pale-blue spaces of air like an inverted lake of
+      bonnyclabber. We stopped the night at Chester, and the next evening, in
+      the full daylight of 7.40, we pushed on to Liverpool, over lovely levels,
+      with a ground swell like that of Kansas plains, under a sunset drying its
+      tears and at last radiantly smiling.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The hotel in Liverpool swarmed and buzzed with busy and murmurous American
+      arrivals. One could hardly get at the office window, on account of them,
+      to plead for a room. A dense group of our countrywomen were buying
+      picture-postals of the rather suave office-ladies, and helplessly fawning
+      on them in the inept confidences of American women with all persons in
+      official or servile attendance. &ldquo;Let me stay here,&rdquo; one of
+      them entreated, &ldquo;because there&rsquo;s such a draught at the other
+      window. May I?&rdquo; She was a gentle child of forty-five or fifty; and I
+      do not know whether she was allowed to stay in the sheltered nook or not,
+      tender creature. As she was in every one else&rsquo;s way there, possibly
+      she was harshly driven into the flaw at the other window.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0021}.jpg" alt="{0021}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0021}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      The place was a little America which swelled into a larger with the
+      arrivals of the successive steamers, though the soft swift English trains
+      bore our co-nationals away as rapidly as they could. Many familiar accents
+      remained till the morning, and the breakfast-room was full of a nasal
+      resonance which would have made one at home anywhere in our East or West.
+      I, who was then vainly trying to be English, escaped to the congenial top
+      of the farthest bound tram, and flew, at the rate of four miles an hour,
+      to the uttermost suburbs of Liverpool, whither no rumor of my native
+      speech could penetrate. It was some balm to my wounded pride of country to
+      note how pale and small the average type of the local people was. The
+      poorer classes swarmed along a great part of the tram-line in side streets
+      of a hard, stony look, and what characterized itself to me as a sort of
+      iron squalor seemed to prevail. You cannot anywhere have great prosperity
+      without great adversity, just as you cannot have day without night, and
+      the more Liverpool evidently flourished the more it plainly languished. I
+      found no pleasure in the paradox, and I was not overjoyed by the
+      inevitable ugliness of the brick villas of the suburbs into which these
+      obdurate streets decayed. But then, after divers tram changes, came the
+      consolation of beautiful riverside beaches, thronged with people who
+      looked gay at that distance, and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills,
+      blue, blue.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we rejected
+      a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought it too thatched
+      and too cottage to be quite true (though I do not now say that there were
+      vermin in the straw roof), and accepted the hospitality of a pastry-cook&rsquo;s
+      shop. We felt the more at home with the kind woman who kept it because she
+      had a brother at Chicago in the employ of the Pinkerton Detective Agency,
+      and had once been in Stratford-on-Avon; this doubly satisfied us as
+      cultivated Americans. She had a Welsh name, and she testified to a great
+      prevalence of Welsh and Irish in the population of Liverpool; besides, she
+      sent us to a church of the Crusaders at Little Crosby, and it was no fault
+      of hers that we did not find it. We found one of the many old crosses for
+      which Little Crosby is named, and this was quite as much as we merited. It
+      stood at the intersection of the streets in what seemed the fragment of a
+      village, not yet lost in the vast maw of the city, and it calmed all the
+      simple neighborhood, so that we sat down at its foot and rested a long,
+      long minute till the tram came by and took us back into the loud, hard
+      heart of Liverpool.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not mean to blame it, for it was no louder or harder than the hearts
+      of other big towns, and it had some alleviation from the many young
+      couples who were out together half-holidaying in the unusually pleasant
+      Saturday weather. I wish their complexions had been better, but you cannot
+      have South-of-England color if you live as far north as Liverpool, and all
+      the world knows what the American color is. The young couples abounded in
+      the Gallery of Fine Arts, where they frankly looked at one another instead
+      of the pictures. The pictures might have been better, but then they might
+      have been worse (there being examples of Filippo Lippi, Memmi, Holbein,
+      and, above all, the <i>Dante&rsquo;s Dream</i> of Rossetti); and in any
+      case those couples could come and see them when they were old men and
+      women; but now they had one another in a moment of half-holiday which
+      could not last forever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the evening there were not so many lovers at the religious meetings
+      before the classic edifice opposite the hotel, where the devotions were
+      transacted with the help of a brass-band; but there were many youths
+      smoking short pipes, and flitting from one preacher to another, in the
+      half-dozen groups. Some preachers were nonconformist, but there was one
+      perspiring Anglican priest who labored earnestly with his hearers, and who
+      had more of his aspirates in the right place. Many of his hearers were in
+      the rags which seem a favorite wear in Liverpool, and I hope his words did
+      their poor hearts good.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Slightly apart from the several congregations, I found myself with a
+      fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me in an accent so
+      unlike my own American that I ventured to answer him in Italian. He was
+      indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos Ayres and was
+      presently thinking of New York; and we had some friendly discourse
+      together concerning the English. His ideas of them were often so parallel
+      with my own that I hardly know how to say he thought them an improvident
+      people. I owned that they spent much more on state, or station, than the
+      Americans; but we neither had any censure for them otherwise. He was of
+      that philosophic mind which one is rather apt to encounter in the Latin
+      races, and I could well wish for his further acquaintance. His talk rapt
+      me to far other and earlier scenes, and I seemed to be conversing with him
+      under a Venetian heaven, among objects of art more convincing than the
+      equestrian statue of the late Queen, who had no special motive I could
+      think of for being shown to her rightly loving subjects on horseback. We
+      parted with the expressed hope of seeing each other again, and if this
+      should meet his eye and he can recall the pale young man, with the dark
+      full beard, who chatted with him between the pillars of the Piazzetta,
+      forty years before our actual encounter I would be glad of his address.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      How strange are the uses of travel! There was a time when the mention of
+      Liverpool would have conjured up for me nothing but the thought of
+      Hawthorne, who spent divers dull consular years there, and has left a
+      record of them which I had read, with the wish that it were cheerfuler.
+      Yet, now, here on the ground his feet might have trod, and in the very
+      smoke he breathed, I did not once think of him. I thought as little of
+      that poor Felicia Hemans, whose poetry filled my school-reading years with
+      the roar of the wintry sea breaking from the waveless Plymouth Bay on the
+      stern and rock-bound coast where the Pilgrim Fathers landed on a bowlder
+      measuring eight by ten feet, now fenced in against the predatory hammers
+      and chisels of reverent visitors. I knew that Gladstone was born at
+      Liverpool, but not Mrs. Oliphant, and the only literary shade I could
+      summon from a past vague enough to my ignorance was William Roscoe, whose
+      <i>Life of Leo X.</i>, in the Bohn Library, had been too much for my young
+      zeal when my zeal was still young. My other memories of Liverpool have
+      been acquired since my visit, and I now recur fondly to the picturesque
+      times when King John founded a castle there, to the prouder times when Sir
+      Francis Bacon represented it in Parliament; or again to the brave days
+      when it resisted Prince Rupert for three weeks, and the inglorious epoch
+      when the new city (it was then only some four or five hundred years old)
+      began to flourish on the trade in slaves with the colonies of the Spanish
+      Main, and on the conjoint and congenial traffic in rum, sugar, and
+      tobacco.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0027}.jpg" alt="{0027}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0027}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      It will be suspected from these reminiscences that I have been studying a
+      page of fine print in Baedeker, and I will not deceive the reader. It is
+      true; but it is also true that I had some wonder, altogether my own, that
+      so great a city should make so small an appeal to the imagination. In this
+      it outdoes almost any metropolis of our own. Even in journalism, an
+      intensely modern product, it does not excel; Manchester has its able and
+      well-written <i>Guardian</i>, but what has Liverpool? Glasgow has its
+      Glasgow School of Painting, but again what has Liverpool? It is said that
+      not above a million of its people live in it; all the rest, who can,
+      escape to Chester, where they perhaps vainly hope to escape the Americans.
+      There, intrenched in charming villas behind myrtle hedges, they measurably
+      do so; but Americans are very penetrating, and I would not be sure that
+      the thickest and highest hedge was invulnerable to them. As it is, they
+      probably constitute the best society of Liverpool, which the natives have
+      abandoned to them, though they do not constitute it permanently, but
+      consecutively. Every Cunarder, every White Star, pours out upon a city
+      abandoned by its own good society a flood of cultivated Americans, who
+      eddy into its hotels, and then rush out of them by every train within
+      twenty-four hours, and often within twenty-five minutes. They understand
+      that there are no objects of interest in Liverpool; and they are not met
+      at the Customs with invitations to breakfast, luncheon, and dinner from
+      the people of rank and fashion with whom they have come to associate.
+      These have their stately seats in the lovely neighboring country, but they
+      are not at the landing-stage, and even the uncultivated American cannot
+      stay for the vast bourgeoisie of which Liverpool, like the cities of his
+      own land, is composed. Our own cities have a social consciousness, and are
+      each sensible of being a centre, with a metropolitan destiny; but the
+      strange thing about Liverpool and the like English towns is that they are
+      without any social consciousness. Their meek millions are socially unborn;
+      they can come into the world only in London, and in their prenatal
+      obscurity they remain folded in a dreamless silence, while all the
+      commercial and industrial energies rage round them in a gigantic maturity.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of entry for our
+      human cargoes, indentured apprentices of the beautiful, the historical.
+      With the almost immediate transference of the original transatlantic
+      steamship interests from Bristol, Liverpool became the only place where
+      you could arrive. American lines, long erased from the seas, and the Inman
+      line, the Cunard line, the White Star line, and the rest, would land you
+      nowhere else. Then heretical steamers began to land you at Glasgow; worse
+      schismatics carried you to Southampton; there were heterodox craft that
+      touched at Plymouth, and now great swelling agnostics bring you to London
+      itself. Still, Liverpool remains the greatest port of entry for our
+      probationers, who are bound out to the hotels and railroad companies of
+      all Europe till they have morally paid back their fare. The superstition
+      that if you go in a Cunarder you can sleep on both ears is no longer so
+      exclusive as it once was; yet the Cunarder continues an ark of safety for
+      the timid and despairing, and the cooking is so much better than it used
+      to be that if in contravention of the old Cunard rule against a passenger&rsquo;s
+      being carried overboard you do go down, you may be reasonably sure of
+      having eaten something that the wallowing sea-monsters will like in you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0031}.jpg" alt="{0031}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0031}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      I have tried to give some notion of the fond behavior of the arriving
+      Americans in the hotels; no art can give the impression of their exceeding
+      multitude. Expresses, panting with as much impatience as the disciplined
+      English expresses ever suffer themselves to show, await them in the
+      stations, which are effectively parts of the great hotels, and whir away
+      to London with them as soon as they can drive up from the steamer; but
+      many remain to rest, to get the sea out of their heads and legs, and to
+      prepare their spirits for adjustment to the novel conditions. These the
+      successive trains carry into the heart of the land everywhere, these and
+      their baggage, to which they continue attached by their very
+      heart-strings, invisibly stretching from their first-class corridor
+      compartments to the different luggage-vans. I must say they have very
+      tenderly, very perfectly imagined us, all those hotel people and railroad
+      folk, and fold us, anxious and bewildered exiles, in a reassuring and
+      consoling embrace which leaves all their hands&mdash;they are Briarean&mdash;free
+      for the acceptance of our wide, wild tips. You may trust yourself
+      implicitly to their care, but if you are going to Oxford do not trust the
+      head porter who tells you to take the London and Northwestern, for then
+      you will have to change four times on the way and at every junction
+      personally see that your baggage is unladen and started anew to its
+      destination.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      I will suppose the reader not to be going to Oxford, but, in compliance
+      with the scheme of this paper, to Manchester, where there is perhaps no
+      other reason for his going. He will there, for one thing, find the supreme
+      type of the railroad hotel which in England so promptly shelters and so
+      kindly soothes the fluttered exile. At Manchester, even more than at
+      Liverpool, we are imagined in the immense railroad station hotel, which is
+      indeed perhaps superorganized and over-convenienced after an American
+      ideal: one does not, for instance, desire a striking, or even a ticking,
+      clock in the transom above one&rsquo;s bedroom door; but the like type of
+      hotel is to be found at every great railroad centre or terminal in
+      England, and it is never to be found quite bad, though of course it is
+      sometimes better and sometimes worse. It is hard to know if it is more
+      hotel or more station; perhaps it is a mixture of each which defies
+      analysis; but in its well-studied composition you pass, as it were, from
+      your car to your room, as from one chamber to another. This is putting the
+      fact poetically; but, prosaically, the intervening steps are few at the
+      most; and when you have entered your room your train has ceased to be. The
+      simple miracle would be impossible in America, where our trains, when not
+      shrieking at the tops of their whistles, are backing and filling with a
+      wild clangor of their bells, and making a bedlam of their stations; but in
+      England they
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;Come like shadows, so depart,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      and make no sound within the vast caravansary where the enchanted
+      traveller has changed from them into a world of dreams.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      These hotels are, next to the cathedrals, perhaps the greatest wonder of
+      England, and in Manchester the railway hotel is in some ways more
+      wonderful than the cathedral, which is not so much planned on our native
+      methods. Yet this has the merit, if it is a merit, of antedating our
+      Discovery by nearly a century, and pre-historically it is indefinitely
+      older. My sole recorded impression of it is that I found it smelling
+      strongly of coal-gas, such as comes up the register when your furnace is
+      mismanaged; but that is not strange in such a manufacturing centre; and it
+      would be paltering with the truth not to own a general sense of the beauty
+      and grandeur in it which no English cathedral is without. The morning was
+      fitly dim and chill, and one could move about in the vague all the more
+      comfortably for the absence of that appeal of thronging monuments which
+      harasses and bewilders the visitor in other cathedrals; one could really
+      give one&rsquo;s self up to serious emotion, and not be sordidly and
+      rapaciously concerned with objects of interest. Manchester has been an
+      episcopal see only some fifty years; before that the cathedral was simply
+      T&rsquo; Owd Church, and in this character it is still venerable, and is
+      none the less so because of the statue of Oliver Cromwell which holds the
+      chief place in the open square before it. Call it an incongruity, if you
+      will, but that enemy of episcopacy is at least not accused of stabling his
+      horses in The Old Church at Manchester, or despoiling it of its sacred
+      images and stained glass, and he merits a monument there if anywhere.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0045}.jpg" alt="{0045}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0045}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      With the constantly passing trams which traverse the square, he is
+      undoubtedly more significant of modern Manchester than the episcopacy is,
+      and perhaps of that older Manchester which held for him against the king,
+      and that yet older Manchester of John Bradford, the first martyr of the
+      Reformation to suffer death at the stake in Smithfield. Of the still yet
+      older, far older Manchester, which trafficked with the Greeks of
+      Marseilles, and later passed under the yoke of Agricola and was a Roman
+      military station, and got the name of Maen-ceaster from the Saxons, and
+      was duly bedevilled by the Danes and mishandled by the Normans, there may
+      be traces in the temperament of the modern town which would escape even
+      the scrutiny of the hurried American. Such a compatriot was indeed much
+      more bent upon getting a pair of cotton socks, like those his own
+      continent wears almost universally in summer, but a series of exhaustive
+      visits to all the leading haberdashers in Manchester developed the strange
+      fact that there, in the world-heart of the cotton-spinning industry, there
+      was no such thing to be found. In Manchester there are only woollen socks,
+      heavier or lighter, to be bought, and the shopmen smile pityingly if you
+      say, in your strange madness, that woollen socks are not for summer wear.
+      Possibly, however, it was not summer in Manchester, and we were misled by
+      the almanac. Possibly we had been spoiled by three weeks of warm, sunny
+      rain on the Welsh coast, and imagined a vain thing in supposing that the
+      end of August was not the beginning of November.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I thought Manchester, however, as it shows itself in its public edifices,
+      a most dignified town, with as great beauty as could be expected of a
+      place which has always had so much to do besides looking after its figure
+      and complexion. The very charming series or system of parks, public
+      gardens, and playgrounds, unusual in their number and variety, had a
+      sympathetic allure in the gray, cool light, even to the spectator passing
+      in a hurried hansom. They have not the unity of the Boston or Chicago
+      parkways, and I will own that I had not come to Manchester for them. What
+      interested me more were the miles and miles of comfortable-looking little
+      brick houses in which, for all I knew, the mill-labor dwelt. Very possibly
+      it did not; the mills themselves are now nearly all, or mostly, outside of
+      Manchester, and perhaps for this reason I did not find the slums, when
+      shown them, very slummy, and I saw no such dreadful shapes of rags and
+      dirt as in Liverpool. We passed through a quarter of large, old-fashioned
+      mansions, as charming as they were unimagined of Manchester; but these
+      could not have been the dwellings of the mill-hands, any more than of the
+      mill-owners. The mill-owners, at least, live in suburban palaces and
+      villas, which I fancy by this time are not
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &mdash;&ldquo;pricking a cockney ear,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      as in the time of Tennyson&rsquo;s &ldquo;Maud.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What wild and whirling insolences, however, the people who have greatly
+      made the greatness of England have in all times suffered from their poets
+      and novelists, with few exceptions! One need not be a very blind devotee
+      of commercialism or industrialism to resent the affronts put upon them,
+      when one comes to the scenes of such mighty achievement as Liverpool, and
+      Manchester, and Sheffield; but how mildly they seem to have taken it all&mdash;with
+      what a meek subordination and sufferance! One asks one&rsquo;s self
+      whether the society of such places can be much inferior to that of
+      Pittsburg, or Chicago, or St. Louis, which, even from the literary attics
+      of New York, we should not exactly allow ourselves to spit upon.
+      Practically, I know nothing about society in Manchester, or rather, out of
+      it; and I can only say of the general type, of richer or poorer, as I saw
+      it in the streets, that it was uncommonly good. Not so many women as men
+      were abroad in such weather as we had, and I cannot be sure that the sex
+      shows there that superiority physically which it has long held morally
+      with us. One learns in the north not to look for the beautiful color of
+      the south and west; but in Manchester the average faces were intelligent
+      and the figures good.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      With such a journal as the Manchester <i>Guardian</i> still keeping its
+      high rank among English newspapers, there cannot be question of the
+      journalistic sort of thinking in the place. Of the sort that comes to its
+      effect in literature, such as, say, Mrs. Gaskell&rsquo;s novels, there may
+      also still be as much as ever; and I will not hazard my safe ignorance in
+      a perilous conjecture. I can only say that of the Unitarianism which
+      eventuated in that literature, I heard it had largely turned to
+      episcopacy, as Unitarianism has in our own Boston. I must not forget that
+      one of our religions, now a dying faith, was invented in Manchester by Ann
+      Lee, who brought, through the usual persecutions, Shakerism to such
+      spiritual importance as it has now lost in these States. Only those who
+      have known the Shakers, with their good lives and gentle ways, can regret
+      with me the decline of the celibate communism which their foundress
+      imagined in her marital relations with the Lancashire blacksmith she left
+      behind her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am reminded (or perhaps instructed) by Mr. Hope Moncrieff in Black&rsquo;s
+      excellent <i>Guide to Manchester</i> that before Mrs. Gaskell&rsquo;s
+      celebrity the fitful fame of De Quincey shed a backward gleam upon his
+      native place, which can still show the house where he was probably born
+      and the grammar-school he certainly ran away from. In my forgetfulness, or
+      my ignorance, that Manchester was the mother of this tricksy master-spirit
+      of English prose, who was an idol of my youth, I failed to visit either
+      house. The renown of Cobden and of Bright is precious to a larger world
+      than mine; and the name of the stalwart Quaker friend of man is dear to
+      every American who remembers the heroic part he played in our behalf
+      during our war for the Union. It is one of the amusing anomalies of the
+      British constitution, that the great city from whose political fame these
+      names are inseparable should have had no representation in Parliament from
+      Cromwell&rsquo;s time to Victoria&rsquo;s. Fancy Akron, Ohio, or Grand
+      Rapids, Michigan, without a member of Congress!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      {Illustration: TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER}
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The &ldquo;Manchester school&rdquo; of political economy has long since
+      passed into reproach if not obloquy with people for whom a byword is a
+      potent weapon, and perhaps the easiest they can handle, and I am not
+      myself so extreme a <i>laissez-faireist</i> as to have thought of that
+      school with pathos in the city of its origin; but I dare say it was a good
+      thing in its time. We are only now slowly learning how to apply the
+      opposite social principles in behalf of the Man rather than the Master,
+      and we have not yet surmounted all the difficulties or dangers of the
+      experiment. It is droll how, in a tolerably well-meaning world like this,
+      any sort of contempt becomes inclusive, and a whole population suffers for
+      the vice, or it may be the virtue, of a very small majority, or a very
+      powerful minority. Probably the most liberal and intelligent populations
+      of Great Britain are those of Manchester and Birmingham, names which have
+      stood for a hard and sordid industrialism, unrelieved by noble sympathies
+      and impulses. It is quite possible that a less generous spirit than mine
+      would have censured the &ldquo;Manchester school&rdquo; for the weather of
+      the place, and found in its cold gray light the effect of the Gradgrind
+      philosophy which once wrapt a world of fiction in gloom.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I can only be sure that the light, what little there was of it, was very
+      cold and gray, but it quite sufficed to show the huge lowries, as the
+      wagons are called, passing through the streets with the cotton fabrics of
+      the place in certain stages of manufacture: perhaps the raw, perhaps the
+      finished material. In Manchester itself one sees not much else of &ldquo;the
+      cotton-spinning chorus&rdquo; which has sent its name so far. The cotton
+      is now spun in ten or twenty towns in the nearer or farther neighborhood
+      of the great city, as every one but myself and some ninety millions of
+      other Americans well know. I had seen something of cotton-mills in our
+      Lowell, and I was eager, if not willing, to contrast them with the mills
+      of Manchester; but such of these as still remained there were, for my
+      luckless moment, inoperative. Personal influences brought me within one or
+      two days of their starting up; one almost started up during my brief stay;
+      but a great mill, employing perhaps a thousand hands, cannot start up for
+      the sake of the impression desired by the aesthetic visitor, and I had to
+      come away without mine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I had to come away without that personal acquaintance with the great
+      Manchester ship-canal which I almost equally desired. Coming or going, I
+      asked about it, and was told, looking for it from the car window, there,
+      <i>there</i> it was! but beyond a glimpse of something very long and very
+      straight marking the landscape with lines no more convincing than those
+      which science was once decided, and then undecided, to call canals on the
+      planet Mars, I had no sight of it. I do not say this was not my fault; and
+      I will not pretend that the canal, like the mills of Manchester, was not
+      running. I dare say I was not in the right hands, but this was not for
+      want of trying to get into them. In the local delusion that it was then
+      summer, those whose kindness might have befriended the ignorance of the
+      stranger were &ldquo;away on their holidays&rdquo;: that was exactly the
+      phrase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When, by a smiling chance, I fell into the right hands and was borne to
+      the Cotton Exchange I did not fail of a due sense of the important scene,
+      I hope. The building itself, like the other public buildings of
+      Manchester, is most dignified, and the great hall of the exchange is very
+      noble. I would not, if I could, have repressed a thrill of pride in seeing
+      our national colors and emblems equalled with those of Great Britain at
+      one end of the room, but these were the only things American in the
+      impression left. We made our way through the momently thickening groups on
+      the floor, and in the guidance of a member of the exchange found a
+      favorable point of observation in the gallery. From this the vast space
+      below showed first a moving surface of hats, with few silk toppers among
+      them, but a multitude of panamas and other straws. The marketing was not
+      carried on with anything like the wild, rangy movement of our Stock
+      Exchange, and the floor sent up no such hell-roaring (there is no other
+      phrase for it) tumult as rises from the mad but not malign demons of that
+      most dramatic representation of perdition. The merchants, alike staid,
+      whether old or young, congregated in groups which, dealing in a common
+      type of goods, kept the same places till, toward three o&rsquo;clock, they
+      were lost in the mass which covered the floor. Even then there was no
+      uproar, no rush or push, no sharp cries or frenzied shouting; but from the
+      crowd, which was largely made up of elderly men, there rose a sort of
+      surd, rich hum, deepening ever, and never breaking into a shriek of
+      torment or derision. It was not histrionic, and yet for its commercial
+      importance it was one of the most moving spectacles which could offer
+      itself to the eye in the whole world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      {Illustration: THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL}
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot pretend to have profited by my visit to that immensely valuable
+      deposit of books, bought from the Spencer family at Althorp, and dedicated
+      as the Rylands library to the memory of a citizen of Manchester. Books in
+      a library, except you have time and free access to them, are as baffling
+      as so many bottles in a wine-cellar, which are not opened for you, and
+      which if they were would equally go to your head without final advantage.
+      I find, therefore, that my sole note upon the Rylands Library is the very
+      honest one that it smelt, like the cathedral, of coal-gas. The absence of
+      this gas was the least merit of the beautiful old Chetham College, with
+      its library dating from the seventeenth century, and claiming to have been
+      the first free library in England, and doubtless the world. In the
+      cloistered picturesqueness of the place, its mediaeval memorials, and its
+      ancient peace, I found myself again in those dear Middle Ages which are
+      nowhere quite wanting in England, and against which I rubbed off all
+      smirch of the modernity I had come to Manchester for.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      If I had waited a little till I had got into the beautiful Derbyshire
+      country which lies, or rather rolls, between Manchester and Sheffield, I
+      could as easily have got rid of my epoch in the smiling agricultural
+      landscape. I do not know just the measure of the Black Country in England,
+      or where Sheffield begins to be perhaps the blackest spot in it; but I am
+      sure that nothing not surgically clean could be whiter than the roads
+      that, almost as soon as we were free of Manchester, began to climb the
+      green, thickly wooded hills, and dip into the grassy and leafy valleys. In
+      the very heart of the loveliness we found Sheffield most nobly posed
+      against a lurid sunset, and clouding the sky, which can never be certain
+      of being blue, with the smoke of a thousand towering chimneys. From
+      whatever point you have it, the sight is most prodigious, but no doubt the
+      subjective sense of the great ducal mansions and estates which neighbor
+      the mirky metropolis of steel and iron has its part in heightening the
+      dramatic effect.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The English, with their love of brevity and simplicity, call these proud
+      seats the Dukeries, but our affair was not with them, and I shall not be
+      able to follow the footmen or butlers or housekeepers who would so
+      obligingly show them to the reader in my company. I had a fine
+      consciousness of passing some of them on my way into the town, and when
+      there of being, however, incongruously, in the midst of them. Worksop,
+      more properly than Sheffield, is the plebeian heart of these aristocratic
+      homes, or sojourns, which no better advised traveller, or less hurried,
+      will fail to see. But I was in Sheffield to see the capital of the Black
+      Country in its most characteristic aspects, and I thought it felicitously
+      in keeping, after I had dined (less well than I could have wished, at the
+      railway hotel which scarcely kept the promise made for it by other like
+      hotels) that I should be tempted beyond my strength to go and see that
+      colored opera which we had lately sent, after its signal success with us,
+      to an even greater prosperity in England. <i>In Dahomey</i> is a musical
+      drama not pitched in the highest key, but it is a genuine product of our
+      national life, and to witness its performance by the colored brethren who
+      invented it, and were giving it with great applause in an atmosphere quite
+      undarkened by our racial prejudices, was an experience which I would not
+      have missed for many Dukeries. The kindly house was not so suffocatingly
+      full that it could not find breath for cheers and laughter; but I proudly
+      felt that no one there could delight so intelligently as the sole
+      American, in the familiar Bowery figures, the blue policemen, the varying
+      darky types, which peopled a scene largely laid in Africa. The local New
+      York suggestions were often from Mr. Edward Harrigan, and all the more
+      genuine for that, but there was a final cake-walk which owed its
+      inspiration wholly to the genius of a race destined to greater triumphs in
+      music and art, and perhaps to a kindlier civilization than our ideals have
+      evolved in yet. It was pleasant to look upon those different shades of
+      color, from dead black to creamy blond, in their novel relief against an
+      air of ungrudging, of even respectful, appreciation, and I dare say the
+      poor things liked it for themselves as much as I liked it for them. At a
+      fine moment of the affair I was aware of a figure in evening dress,
+      standing near me, and regarding the stage with critical severity: a young
+      man, but shrewd and well in hand, who, as the unmistakable manager, was, I
+      hope, finally as well satisfied as the other spectators.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I myself came away entirely satisfied, indeed, but for the lasting pang I
+      inflicted upon myself by denying a penny to the ragged wretch who
+      superfluously opened the valves of my hansom for me. My explanation to my
+      soul was that I had no penny in my pocket, and that it would have been
+      folly little short of crime to give so needy a wretch sixpence. But would
+      it? Would it have corrupted him, since pauperize him further it could not?
+      I advise the reader who finds himself in the like case to give the
+      sixpence, and if he cares for the peace of my conscience, to make it a
+      shilling; or, come! a half-crown, if he wishes to be truly handsome. It is
+      astonishing how these regrets persist; but perhaps in this instance I owe
+      the permanence of my pang to those frequent appeals to one&rsquo;s pity
+      which repeated themselves in Sheffield. As I had noted at Liverpool I now
+      noted at Sheffield that you cannot have great prosperity without having
+      adversity, just as you cannot have heat without cold or day without dark.
+      The one substantiates and verifies the other; and I perceived that
+      wherever business throve it seemed to be at the cost of somebody; though
+      even when business pines it is apparently no better. The thing ought to be
+      looked into.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the moment of my visit to Sheffield, it happened that many works were
+      running half-time or no time, and many people were out of work. At one
+      place there was a little oblong building between branching streets, round
+      which sat a miserable company of Murchers, as I heard them called, on long
+      benches under the overhanging roof, who were too obviously, who were
+      almost offensively, out of work. Some were old and some young, some dull
+      and some fierce, some savage and some imbecile in their looks, and they
+      were all stained and greasy and dirty, and looked their apathy or their
+      grim despair. Even the men who were coming to or from their work at
+      dinner-time looked stunted and lean and pale, with no color of that south
+      of England bloom with which they might have favored a stranger. Slatternly
+      girls and women abounded, and little babies carried about by a little
+      larger babies, and of course kissed on their successive layers of dirt.
+      There were also many small boys who, I hope, were not so wicked as they
+      were ragged. At noon-time they hung much about the windows of cookshops
+      which one would think their sharp hunger would have pierced to the
+      steaming and smoking dishes within. The very morning after I had denied
+      that man a penny at the theatre door, and was still smarting to think I
+      had not given him sixpence, I saw a boy of ten, in the cut-down tatters of
+      a man, gloating upon a meat-pie which a cook had cruelly set behind the
+      pane in front of him. I took out the sixpence which I ought to have given
+      that poor man, and made it a shilling, and put it into the boy&rsquo;s
+      wonderfully dirty palm, and bade him go in and get the pie. He looked at
+      me, and he looked at the shilling, and then I suppose he did as he was
+      bid. But I ought to say, in justice to myself, that I never did anything
+      of the kind again as long as I remained in Sheffield. I felt that I owed a
+      duty to the place and must not go about corrupting the populace for my
+      selfish pleasure.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Between our hotel and the main part of the town there yawned a black
+      valley, rather nobly bridged, or viaducted, and beyond it in every
+      direction the chimneys of the many works thickened in the perspectives. It
+      was really like a dead forest, or like thick-set masts of shipping in a
+      thronged port; or the vents of tellurian fires, which send up their flames
+      by night and their smoke by day. It was splendid, it was magnificent, it
+      was insurpassably picturesque. People must have painted it often, but if
+      some bravest artist-soul would come, reverently, not patronizingly, and
+      portray the sight in its naked ugliness, he would create one of the most
+      beautiful masterpieces in the world. On our first morning the sun, when it
+      climbed to the upper heavens, found a little hole in the dun pall, and
+      shone down through it, and tried to pierce through the more immediate
+      cloud above the works; but it could not, and it ended by shutting the hole
+      under it, and disappearing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Beyond the foul avenues thridding the region of the works, and smelling of
+      the decay of market-houses, were fine streets of shops and churches, and I
+      dare say comely dwellings, with tram-cars ascending and descending their
+      hilly slopes. The stores I find noted as splendid, and in my pocket-book I
+      say that outside of the market-house, before you got to those streets,
+      there are doves and guinea-pigs as well as a raven for sale in cages; and
+      the usual horrible English display of flesh meats. The trams were one
+      story, like our trolleys, without roof-seats, and there were plenty of
+      them; but nothing could keep me, I suppose, till I had seen one of the
+      works. Each of these stands in a vast yard, or close, by itself, with many
+      buildings, and they are of all sorts; but I chose what I thought the most
+      typical, and overcame the reluctance of the manager to let me see it. He
+      said I had no idea what tricks were played by other makers to find out any
+      new processes and steal them; but this was after I had pleaded my innocent
+      trade of novelist, and assured him of my congenital incapability of
+      understanding, much less conveying from the premises, the image of the
+      simplest and oldest process. Then he gave me for guide an intelligent man
+      who was a penknife-maker by trade, but was presently out of work, and glad
+      to earn my fee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My guide proved a most decent, patient, and kindly person, and I hope it
+      is no betrayal of confidence to say that he told me the men in these
+      multitudinous shops work by the piece. The grinders furnish their
+      grindstones and all their tools for making the knives; there is no dry
+      grinding, such as used to fill the lungs of the grinders with deadly
+      particles of steel and stone, and bring them to an early death; but
+      sometimes a stone, which ordinarily lasts six months, will burst and drive
+      the grinder through the roof. The blade-makers do their own forging and
+      hammering, and it is from first to last apparently all hand-work. But it
+      is head-work and heart-work too, and the men who wrought at it wrought
+      with such intensity and constancy that they did not once look up or round
+      where we paused to look on. I was made to know that trade was dull and
+      work slack, and these fellows were lucky fellows to have anything to do.
+      Still I did not envy them; and I felt it a distinct relief to pass from
+      their shops into the cool, dim crypt which was filled with tusks of ivory,
+      in all sizes from those of the largest father elephant to those of the
+      babes of the herd; these were milk-tusks, I suppose. They get dearer as
+      the elephants get scarcer; and that must have been why I paid as much for
+      a penknife in the glittering showroom as it would have cost me in New
+      York, with the passage money and the duties added. Because of the price,
+      perhaps, I did not think of buying the two-thousand-bladed penknife I saw
+      there; but I could never have used all the blades, now that we no longer
+      make quill pens. I looked fondly at the maker&rsquo;s name on the knife I
+      did buy, and said that the table cutlery of a certain small household
+      which set itself up forty years ago had borne the same: but the pleasant
+      salesman did not seem to feel the pathos of the fact so much as I.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There is not only a vast deal of industry in Sheffield, but there is an
+      unusual abundance of history, as there might very well be in a place that
+      began life, in the usual English fashion, under the Britons and grew into
+      municipal consciousness in the fostering care of the Romans and the ruder
+      nurture of the Saxons, Danes, and Normans. Lords it had of the last, and
+      the great line of the Earls of Shrewsbury presently rose and led Sheffield
+      men back to battle in France, where the first earl fell on the bloody
+      field, and so many of the men died with him in 1453 that there was not a
+      house in all the region which did not mourn a loss. Which of the Roses
+      Sheffield held for, White or Red, I am not sure; but we will say that it
+      duly suffered for one or the other; and it is certain that the great
+      Cardinal Wolsey rested eighteen days at Sheffield Manor just before he
+      went to die at Leicester; and Mary Queen of Scots spent fourteen years of
+      sorrowful captivity, sometimes at the Manor and sometimes in Sheffield
+      Castle. This hold was taken by the Parliamentarians in the Civil War; but
+      the famous industries of the place had begun long before; so that Chaucer
+      could say of one of his pilgrims,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;A Sheffield thwytel bare he in his hose.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      Thwytels, or whittles, figured in the broils and stage-plays of
+      Elizabethan times, and three gross of them were exported from Liverpool in
+      1589, when the Sheffield penknife was already famed the best in the world.
+      Manufactures flourished there apace when England turned to them from
+      agriculture, and Sheffield is now a city of four hundred thousand or more.
+      Apparently it has been growing radical, as the centres of prosperity and
+      adversity always do, and the days of the Chartist agitation continued
+      there for ten years, from 1839 till it came as near open rebellion as it
+      well could in a plot for an armed uprising. Then that cause of the people,
+      like many another, failed, and liberty there, as elsewhere in England, was
+      fain to
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+        &ldquo;broaden slowly down
+     From precedent to precedent.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0063}.jpg" alt="{0063}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0063}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      Labor troubles, patient or violent, have followed, as labor troubles must,
+      but leisure has always been equal to their pacification, and now Sheffield
+      takes its adversity almost as quietly as its prosperity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We were not there, though, for others&rsquo; labor or leisure, which we
+      have plenty of at home; but even before I appeased such conscience as I
+      had about seeing a type of the works, we went a long drive up out of the
+      town to that Manor where the poor, brilliant, baddish Scotch queen was
+      imprisoned by her brilliant, baddish English cousin. In any question of
+      goodness, there was little to choose between them; both were blood-stained
+      liars; but it is difficult being a good woman and a queen too, and they
+      only failed where few have triumphed. Mary is the more appealing to the
+      fancy because she suffered beyond her deserts, but Elizabeth was to be
+      pitied because Mary had made it politically imperative for her to kill
+      her. All this we had threshed out many times before, and had said that,
+      cat for cat, Mary was the more dangerous because she was the more
+      feminine, and Elizabeth the more detestable because she was the more
+      masculine in her ferocity. We were therefore in the right mood to visit
+      Mary&rsquo;s prison, and we were both indignant and dismayed to find that
+      our driver, called from a mews at a special price set upon his
+      intelligence, had never heard of it and did not know where it was.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We reported his inability to the head porter, who came out of the hotel in
+      a fine flare of sarcasm. &ldquo;You call yourself a Sheffield man and not
+      know where the Old Manor is!&rdquo; he began, and presently reduced that
+      proud ignoramus of a driver to such a willingness to learn that we thought
+      it at least safe to set out with him, and so started for the long climb up
+      the hills that hold Sheffield in their hollow. When we reached their
+      crest, we looked down and back through the clearer air upon as strange and
+      grand a sight as could be. It was as if we were looking into the crater of
+      a volcano, which was sending up its smoke through a thousand vents. All
+      detail of the works and their chimneys was lost in the retrospect; one was
+      aware only of a sort of sea of vapor through which they loomed and
+      gloomed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our ascent was mostly through winding and climbing streets of little dirty
+      houses, with frowsy gardens beside them, and the very dirtiest-faced
+      children in England playing about them. From time to time our driver had
+      to ask his way of the friendly flat-bosomed slatterns, with babies in
+      their arms, on their thresholds, or the women tending shop, or peddling
+      provisions, who were all kind to him, and assured him with varying degrees
+      of confidence that the Old Manor was a bit, or a goodish bit, beyond. All
+      at once we came upon the sight of it on an open top, hard by what is left
+      of the ruins of the real Manor, where Wolsey stayed that little while from
+      death. The relics are broken walls, higher here, lower there; with some
+      Tudor fireplaces showing through their hollow windows. What we saw in
+      tolerable repair was the tower of the Manor, or the lodge, and we drove to
+      it across a field, on a track made by farm carts, and presently kept by a
+      dog that showed his teeth in a grin not wholly of amusement at our
+      temerity. While we debated whether we had not better let the driver get
+      down and knock, a farmer-like man came to the door and called the dog off.
+      Then, in a rich North Country accent, he welcomed us to his kitchen
+      parlor, where his wife was peeling potatoes for their midday dinner, and
+      so led us up the narrow stone stairs of the tower to the chambers where
+      Mary miserably passed those many long years of captivity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The rooms were visibly restored in every point where they could have
+      needed restoration, but they were not ruthlessly or too insistently
+      restored. There was even an antique chair, but when our guide was put on
+      his honor as to whether it was one of the original chairs he answered,
+      &ldquo;Well, if people wanted a chair!&rdquo; He was a rather charmingly
+      quaint, humorous person, with that queer conscience, and he did not
+      pretend to be moved by the hard inexorable stoniness of the place which
+      had been a queen&rsquo;s prison for many years. One must not judge it too
+      severely, though: bowers and prisons of that day looked much alike, and
+      Mary Stuart may have felt this a bower, and only hated it because she
+      could not get out of it, or anyhow break the relentless hold of that Earl
+      and Countess of Shrewsbury whose captive guest she was, though she never
+      ceased trying. We went up on the wide flat roof, of lead or stone, whither
+      her feet must have so often heavily climbed, and looked out over the
+      lovely landscape which she must have abhorred; and the wind that blew over
+      it, in late August, was very cold; far colder than the air of the prison,
+      or the bower, below.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The place belongs now to the Duke of Norfolk, the great Catholic duke, and
+      owes its restoration to his pity and his piety. Our farmer guide was
+      himself a Protestant, but he spoke well of the duke, with whom he reported
+      himself in such colloquies as, &ldquo;I says to Dook,&rdquo; and, &ldquo;Dook
+      says to me.&rdquo; When he understood that we were Americans he asked
+      after a son of his who had gone out to our continent twenty years before.
+      He had only heard from him once, and that on the occasion of his being
+      robbed of all his money by a roommate. It was in a place called Massatusy;
+      we suggested Massachusetts, and he assented that such might be the place;
+      and Mary&rsquo;s prison-house acquired an added pathos.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We drove back through the beautiful park, the Duke of Norfolk&rsquo;s gift
+      to Sheffield, which is plentifully provided, like all English towns, with
+      public pleasure-grounds. They lie rather outside of it, but within it are
+      many and many religious and civic edifices which merit to be seen. We
+      chose as chiefest the ancient Parish Church, of Norman origin and modern
+      restoration, where we visited the tomb of the Lord and Lady Shrewsbury who
+      were Mary Stuart&rsquo;s jailers; or if they were not, a pair of their
+      family were, and it comes to the same thing, emotionally. The chapel in
+      which they lie is most beautiful, and the verger had just brushed the
+      carpet within the chancel to such immaculate dustlessness that he could
+      not bring himself to let us walk over it. He let us walk round it, and we
+      saw the chapel as a favor, which we discharged with an abnormal tip after
+      severe debate whether a person of this verger&rsquo;s rich respectability
+      and perfect manner would take any tip at all. In the event it appeared
+      that he would.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      NINE DAYS&rsquo; WONDER IN YORK
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps it would be better to come to York somewhat earlier in the year
+      than the 2d of September. By that time the English summer has suffered
+      often if not severe discouragements. It has really only two months out of
+      the year to itself, and even July and August are not always constant to
+      it. To be sure, their defection cannot spoil it, but they dispose it to
+      the slights of September in a dejection from which there is no rise to
+      those coquetries with October known to our own summer. Yet, having said so
+      much, I feel bound to add that our nine days in York, from the 2d to the
+      12th of September, were more summer than autumn days, some wholly, some
+      partly, with hours of sunshine keeping the flowers bright which the rain
+      kept fresh. If you walked fast in this sunshine you were quite hot, and
+      sometimes in the rain you were uncomfortably warm, or at least you were
+      wet. If the mornings demanded a fire in the grate, the evenings were so
+      clement that the lamp was sufficient, and the noons were very well with
+      neither.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The day of our arrival in York began bright at Sheffield, where there was
+      a man quarrelling so loudly and aimlessly in the station that we were glad
+      to get away from him, as well as from the mountains of slag surrounding
+      the iron metropolis. The train ran through a pass in these, and then we
+      found ourselves in a plain country, and, though the day turned gray and
+      misty, there seemed a sort of stored sunshine in the fields of wheat which
+      the farmers were harvesting far and near. One has heard so much of the
+      decay of the English agriculture that one sees what is apparently the
+      contrary with nothing less than astonishment. The acreage of these
+      wheat-fields was large, and the yield heavier than I could remember to
+      have seen at home. Where the crop had been got in, much ploughing for the
+      next year had been done already, and where the ploughing was finished the
+      work of sowing by drill was going steadily forward, in the faith that such
+      an unprecedented summer as was now passing would return another year. At
+      all these pleasant labors, of course, the rooks were helping, or at least
+      bossing.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We expected to stay certainly a week, and perhaps two weeks, in York, and
+      our luck with railway hotels had been so smiling elsewhere that we had no
+      other mind than to spend the time at the house into which we all but
+      stepped from our train. But we had reckoned without our host, as he was
+      represented by one of a half-dozen alert young ladies in the office, who
+      asked how long we expected to stay, and when we expressed a general
+      purpose of staying indefinitely, said that all her rooms were taken from
+      the next Monday by people who had engaged them long before for the races.
+      I did not choose to betray my ignorance to a woman, but I privately asked
+      the head porter what races those were which were limiting our proposed
+      sojourn, and I am now afraid he had some difficulty in keeping a head
+      porter&rsquo;s conventional respect for a formal superior in answering
+      that we had arrived on the eve of Doncaster Week. Then I said, &ldquo;Oh
+      yes,&rdquo; and affected the knowledge of Doncaster Week which I resolved
+      to acquire by staying somewhere in York till it was over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But as yet, that Friday afternoon, there was no hurry, and, instead of
+      setting about a search for lodgings at once, we drove up into the town, as
+      soon as we had tea, and visited York Minster while it was still the gray
+      afternoon and not yet the gray evening. I thought the hour fortunate, and
+      I do not see yet how we could have chosen a better hour out of the whole
+      twenty-four, for the inside or the outside of the glorious fane, the
+      grandest and beautifulest in all England, as I felt then and I feel now.
+      If I were put to the question and were forced to say in what its supreme
+      grandeur and beauty lay, I should perhaps say in its most ample
+      simplicity. No doubt it is full of detail, but I keep no sense of this
+      from that mighty interior, with its tree-like, clustered pillars, and its
+      measureless windows, like breadths of stained foliage in autumnal
+      woodlands. You want the scale of nature for the Minster at York, and I
+      cannot liken it to less than all-out-doors. Some cathedrals, like that of
+      Wells, make you think of gardens; but York Minster will not be satisfied
+      with less than an autumnal woodland, where the trees stand in clumps, with
+      grassy levels about them, and with spacious openings to the sky, that let
+      in the colored evening light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      You could not get lost in it, for it was so free of all such architectural
+      undergrowth as cumbers the perspectives of some cathedrals; besides, the
+      afternoon of our visit there were so many other Americans that you could
+      easily have asked your way in your own dialect. We loitered over its
+      lengths and breadths, and wondered at its windows, which were like the
+      gates of sunrise and sunset for magnitude, and lingered in a sumptuous
+      delay from going into the choir, delighting in the gray twilight which
+      seemed to gather from the gray walls inward, when suddenly what seemed a
+      metallic curtain was dropped with a clash and the simultaneous up-flashing
+      of electric bulbs inside it, and we were shut out from the sight but not
+      the sound of the service that began in the choir. We could not wholly
+      regret the incident, for as we recalled the like operation of religion in
+      churches of our Italian travel, we were reminded how equally authoritative
+      the Church of England and the Church of Home were, and how little they
+      adjust their ceremonial to the individual, how largely to the collective
+      worshipper. You could come into the Minster of York as into the basilica
+      of St. Mark at Venice for a silent prayer amid the religious influences of
+      the place, and be conscious of your oneness with your Source, as if there
+      were no other one; but when the priesthood called you as one of many to
+      your devotions, it was with the same imperative voice in both, and you
+      must obey or be cut off from your chance. I suppose it is right; but
+      somehow the down-clashing of that screen of the choir in the Minster at
+      York seemed to exclude us with reproach, almost with ignominy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0075}.jpg" alt="{0075}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0075}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      We did what we could to repair our wounded self respect, and did not lay
+      our exclusion up against the Minster itself, which I find that I noted as
+      &ldquo;scatteringly noble outside.&rdquo; By this I dare say I meant it
+      had not that artistic unity of which I brought the impression from the
+      inside. They were doing, as they were always doing, every where, with
+      English cathedrals, something to one of the towers; but this only enhanced
+      its scattering nobleness, for it left that greatly bescaffolded tower
+      largely to the imagination, in which it soared sublimer, if anything, than
+      its compeer. Most of the streets leading to and from the rather
+      insufficient, irregular square where the Minster stands are lanes of
+      little houses of the fifteenth and sixteenth, centuries, which
+      collectively curved in their line, and not only overhung at their second
+      stories, but bulged outward involuntarily from the weakness of age. They
+      were all quite habitable, and some much later dwellings immediately
+      surrounding the church were the favorite sojourn, apparently, of such
+      strangers as could have rooms at the hotels only until the Monday of
+      Doncaster Week.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      During those limited days of the week before Doncaster, I was constantly
+      coming back to the Minster, which is not the germ of political York, or
+      hardly religious York; the brave city was a Romano-British capital and a
+      Romano-British episcopal see centuries before the first wooden temple was
+      built on the site of the present edifice in 627. I should like to make
+      believe that we found traces of that simple church in the crypt of the
+      Minster when we went the next morning and were herded through it by the
+      tenderest of vergers. Most of our flock were Americans, and we put our
+      guide to such question in matters of imagination and information as the
+      patience of a less amiable shepherd would not have borne. Many a tale,
+      true or o&rsquo;ertrue, our verger had, which he told with unction; when
+      he ascended with us to the body of the church, and said that the stained
+      glass of the gigantic windows suffered from the depredations of the
+      mistaken birds which pecked holes in the joints of their panes, I felt
+      that I had full measure from him, pressed down and running over. I do not
+      remember why he said the birds should have done this, but it seems
+      probable that they took the mellow colors of the glass for those of ripe
+      fruits.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For myself, I could not get enough of those windows, in another sort of
+      famine which ought at this time to have been sated. I was forever
+      wondering at their grandeur outside and their glory inside. I was glad to
+      lose my way about the town, for if I kept walking I was sure, sooner or
+      later, to bring up at the Minster; but the last evening of our stay I made
+      a purposed pilgrimage to it for a final emotion. It was the clearest
+      evening we had in York, and at half-past six the sun was setting in a
+      transparent sky, which somehow it did not flush with any of those glaring
+      reds which the vulgarer sorts of sunsets are fond of, but bathed the air
+      in a delicate suffusion of daffodil light, just tinged with violet. This
+      was the best medium to see the past of the Minster in, and I can see it
+      there now, if I did not then. I followed, or I follow, its veracious
+      history back to the beginning of the seventh century, whence you can look
+      back further still to the earliest Christian temples where the Romans
+      worshipped with the Britons, whom they had enslaved and converted. But it
+      was not till 627 that the little wooden chapel was built on the site of
+      the Minster, to house the rite of the Northumbrian King Eadwine&rsquo;s
+      baptism. He felt so happy in his new faith that he replaced the wooden
+      structure with stone. In the next century it was burned, but rebuilt by
+      another pious prince, and probably repaired by yet another after the Danes
+      took the city a hundred years later. It was then in a good state to be
+      destroyed by that devout William the Conqueror, who came to take the Saxon
+      world in its sins of guttling and guzzling. The first Norman archbishop
+      reconstructed or restored the church, and then it began to rise and to
+      spread in glory&mdash;nave, transepts, and choir, and pillars and towers,
+      Norman and Early English, and Perpendicular and Decorated&mdash;till it
+      found itself at last what the American tourist sees it to-day. It suffered
+      from two great fires in the nineteenth century, the first set by a lunatic
+      who had the fancy of seeing it burn, but who had only the satisfaction of
+      destroying part of the roof.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was never richly painted, but the color wanting in the walls and
+      fretted vault was more than compensated by the mellowed splendors of the
+      matchless windows. It was, indeed, fit to be the home of much more secular
+      history than can be associated with it; but not till the end of the
+      thirteenth century had the Minster a patron of its own, when St. William
+      was canonized, and exercised his office, whatever it was, for two brief
+      centuries. Then the Cromwell of Henry VIII. took possession of it in
+      behalf of the crown, and the saint&rsquo;s charge was practically
+      abolished. He was even deprived of his head, for the relic was encased in
+      gold and jewels, and was therefore worth the king&rsquo;s having, who was
+      most a friend of the reformed religion when it paid best. The later
+      Cromwell, who beat a later king hard by at Marston Moor, must have somehow
+      desecrated the Minster, though there is no record of any such fact. A more
+      authentic monument of the religious difficulties of the times is the
+      pastoral staff, bearing the arms of Catharine of Braganza, the poor little
+      wife of Charles II., which was snatched from a Roman Catholic bishop when,
+      to the high offence of Protestant piety, he was heading a procession in
+      York in 1688. The verger showing us through the Minster was a good
+      Protestant, but he held it bad taste in a predecessor of his, who when
+      leading about a Catholic party of sight-seers took the captive staff from
+      its place and shook it in their faces, saying, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t you wish
+      you had it?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There is no telling to what lengths true religion, may rightly not go. I
+      rather prize the incident as the sole fact concerning the Minster which I
+      could make sure of even after repeated visits, and if I am indebted for my
+      associations with it, long after the event, to Dr. Raine&rsquo;s scholarly
+      and interesting sketch of York history, there is no reason why the
+      better-informed reader should not accompany me in my last visit fully
+      equipped. I walked slowly all round the structure, and fancied that I got
+      a new sense of grandeur in the effect of the east window, which was, at
+      any rate, more impressive than the north window. It was a long walk,
+      almost the measure of such a walk as one should take after supper for one&rsquo;s
+      health, and it had such incidents as many pauses for staring up at the
+      many restorations going on. From point to point the incomparable
+      Perpendicular Gothic carried the eye to the old gargoyles of the caves and
+      towers waiting to be replaced by the new gargoyles, which lay in
+      open-mouthed grimacing in the grass at the bases of the church. While I
+      stood noting both, and thinking the chances were that I should never look
+      on York Minster again, and feeling the luxurious pang of it, a verger in a
+      skull-cap was so good as to come to a side door and parley long and
+      pleasantly with a policeman. The simple local life went on around; people
+      going to or from supper passed me; kind, vulgar noises came from the
+      little houses bulging over the narrow, neighboring streets; there seemed
+      to be the stamping of horses in a stable, and there was certainly the
+      misaspirated talk about them. I could not have asked better material for
+      the humble emotions I love; and I was more than content on my way home to
+      find myself one of the congregation at the loud devotions of a detachment
+      of the Salvation Army. After a battering of drums and a clashing of
+      cymbals and a shouting of hymns, the worship settled to the prayer of a
+      weak brother, who was so long in supplication that the head exhorter
+      covered a yawn with his hand, and at the first sign of relenting in the
+      supplicant bade the drums and cymbals strike up. Then, after a hymn, a
+      sister, such a very plain, elderly sister, with hardly a tooth or an aitch
+      in her head, began to relate her religious history. It appeared that she
+      had been a much greater sinner than she looked, and that the mercy shown
+      her had been proportionate. She was vain both of her sins and mercies,
+      poor soul, and in her scrimp figure, with its ill-fitting uniform, Heaven
+      knows how long she went on. I was distracted by a clergyman passing on the
+      outside of the ring of listening women and children, and looking, I chose
+      to think, somewhat sourly askance at the distasteful ceremonial. I wished
+      to stop him, on his way to the Minster, if that was his way, and tell him
+      that so Christianity must have begun, and so the latest form of it must
+      always begin and work round after ages and ages to the beauty and
+      respectability his own ritual has. But I now believe this would have been
+      the greatest impertinence and hypocrisy, for I myself found the
+      performance before us as tasteless and tawdry as he could possibly have
+      done. He was going toward the Minster, and it would make him forget it;
+      but I was going away from it, perhaps, for the last time, and this loud
+      side-show of religion would make me forget the Minster.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Our railway hotel lay a little way out of the town, and after a day&rsquo;s
+      sight-seeing we were to meet or mingle with troops of wholesome-looking
+      workmen whose sturdiness and brightness were a consolation after the pale
+      debility of labor&rsquo;s looks in Sheffield. From the chocolate-factories
+      or the railroad-shops, which are the chief industries of York, they would
+      be crossing the bridge of the Ouse, the famous stream on which the Romans
+      had their town, and which suggested to the Anglicans to call their
+      Eboracum Eurewic&mdash;a town on a river. In due time the Danes modified
+      this name to Yerik, and so we came honestly by the name of our own New
+      York, called after the old York, as soon as the English had robbed the
+      Dutch of it, and the King of England had given the province to his brother
+      the Duke of York. Both cities are still towns on rivers, but the Ouse is
+      no more an image or forecast of the Hudson than Old York is of New York.
+      For that reason, the bridge over it is not to be compared to our Brooklyn
+      Bridge, or even to any bridge which is yet to span the Hudson. The
+      difference is so greatly in our favor that we may well yield our city&rsquo;s
+      mother the primacy in her city wall. We have ourselves as yet no
+      Plantagenet wall, and we have not yet got a mediaeval gate through which
+      the traveller passes in returning from the Flatiron Building to his hotel
+      in the Grand Central Station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We do not begin to have such a hoar antiquity as is articulate in the
+      mother city, speaking with muted voices from the innumerable monuments
+      which the earth has yielded from the site of our hotel and its adjacent
+      railway station. All underground York is doubtless fuller of Home than
+      even Bath is; and it has happened that her civilization was much more
+      largely dug up here than elsewhere when the foundations of the spreading
+      edifices were laid. The relics are mainly the witnesses of pagan Rome, but
+      Christianity politically began in York, as it has politically ended in New
+      York, and doubtless some soldiers of the Sixth Legion and many of the
+      British slaves were religiously Christians in the ancient metropolis
+      before Constantine was elected emperor there.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have been in many places where history is hospitably at home and is not
+      merely an unwilling guest, as in our unmemoried land. Florence is very
+      well, Venice is not so bad, Naples has her long thoughts, and Milan is
+      mediaeval-minded, not to speak of Genoa, or Marseilles, or Paris, or those
+      romantic German towns where the legends, if not the facts, abound; but,
+      after all, for my pleasure in the past, I could not choose any place
+      before York. You need not be so very definite in your knowledge. The event
+      of Constantine&rsquo;s presence and election is so spacious as to leave no
+      room for particulars in the imagination; and you are so rich in it that
+      you will even reject them from your thoughts, as you sit in the
+      close-cropped flowery lawn of your hotel garden (try to imagine a railroad
+      hotel garden in <i>New</i> York!) on the sunniest of the afternoons before
+      you are turned out for Doncaster Week, and, while you watch a little
+      adventurous American boy climbing over a pile of rock-work, realize the
+      most august, the most important fact in the story of the race as native to
+      the very air you are breathing! Where you sit you are in full view of the
+      Minster, which is to say in view of something like the towers and
+      battlements of the celestial city. Or if you wake very early on a morning
+      still nearer the fatal Doncaster Week of your impending banishment, and
+      look out of your lofty windows at the sunrise reddening the level bars of
+      cloud behind the Minster, you shall find it bulked up against the
+      pearl-gray masses of the sunny mist which hangs in all the intervening
+      trees, and solidifies them in unbroken masses of foliage. All round your
+      hotel spreads a gridiron of railroad, yet such is the force of the English
+      genius for quiet that you hear no clatter of trains; the expresses whir in
+      and out of the station with not more noise than humming-birds; and amid
+      this peace the past has some chance with modernity. The Britons dwell,
+      unmolested by our latter-day clamor, in their wattled huts and dugouts;
+      the Romans come and make them slaves and then Christians, and after three
+      or four hundred years send word from the Tiber to the Ouse that they can
+      stay no longer, and so leave them naked to their enemies, the Picts and
+      Scots and Saxons and Angles; and in due course come the ravaging and
+      burning Danes; and in due course still, the murdering and plundering and
+      scorning Normans. But all so quietly, like the humming-bird-like
+      expresses, with a kind of railway celerity in the foreshortened
+      retrospect; and after the Normans have crushed themselves down into the
+      mass of the vanquished, and formed the English out of the blend, there
+      follow the many wars of the successions, of the Roses, of the Stuarts,
+      with all the intermediate insurrections and rebellions. In the splendid
+      Histories of Shakespeare, which are full of York, the imagination visits
+      and revisits the place, and you are entreated by mouth of one of his
+      princely personages,
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;I pray you let us satisfy our eyes
+      With the memorials and things of fame,
+      That do renown this city,&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      where his Henrys and Richards and Margarets and Edwards and Eleanors abide
+      still and shall forever abide while the English speech lasts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0085}.jpg" alt="{0085}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0085}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Something of all this I knew, and more pretended, with a mounting
+      indignation at the fast-coming Doncaster Week which was to turn us out of
+      our hotel. We began our search for other lodgings with what seemed to be
+      increasing failure. The failure had consolation in it so far as the sweet
+      regret of people whose apartments were taken could console. They would
+      have taken us at other hotels for double the usual price, but, when we
+      showed ourselves willing to pay, it proved that they had no rooms at any
+      price. From house to house, then, we went, at first vaingloriously, in the
+      spaces about the Minster, and then meekly into any side street, wherever
+      the legend of Apartments showed itself in a transom. At last, the second
+      day, after being denied at seven successive houses, we found quite the
+      refuge we wanted in the Bootham, which means very much more than the
+      ignorant reader can imagine. Our upper rooms looked on a pretty grassy
+      garden space behind, where there was sun when there was sun, and in front
+      on the fine old brick dwellings of a most personable street, with a
+      sentiment of bygone fashion. At the upper end of it was a famous city gate&mdash;Bootham
+      Bar, namely&mdash;with a practicable portcullis, which we verified at an
+      early moment by going up into &ldquo;the chamber over the gate,&rdquo;
+      where it was once worked, and whence its lower beam, set thick with savage
+      spikes, was dropped. Outside the gate there was a sign in the wall saying
+      that guards were to be had there to guide travellers through the Forest of
+      Galtres beyond Bootham, and keep them from the wolves. Now woods and
+      wolves and guards are all gone, and Bootham Bar is never closed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The upper room is a passageway for people who are walking round the town
+      on the Plantagenet wall, and one morning we took this walk in sunshine
+      that befitted the Sabbath. Half the children of York seemed to be taking
+      it, too, with their good parents, who had stayed away from church to give
+      them this pleasure, the fathers putting on their frock-coats and top-hats,
+      which are worn on no other days in the provincial cities of England. For a
+      Plantagenet wall, that of York is in excellent repair, and it is very
+      clean, so that the children could not spoil their Sunday best by
+      clambering on the parapet, and trying to fall over it. There was no
+      parapet on the other side, and they could have fallen over that without
+      trouble; but it would not have served the same purpose; for under the
+      parapet there were the most alluringly ragged little boys, with untidy
+      goats and delightfully dirty geese. There was no trace of a moat outside
+      the wall, where pleasant cottages pressed close to it with their gardens
+      full of bright flowers. At one point there were far-spreading sheep and
+      cattle pens, where there is a weekly market, and at another the old Norman
+      castle which cruel Conqueror William built to hold the city, and which has
+      suffered change, not unpicturesque, into prisons for unluckier criminals,
+      and the Assize Courts for their condemnation. From time to time the wall
+      left off, and then we got down, perforce, and walked to the next piece of
+      it. In these pieces we made the most of the old gates, especially Walmgate
+      Bar, which has a barbican. I should be at a loss to say why the barbican
+      should have commended it so; perhaps it was because we there realized, for
+      the first time, what a barbican was; I doubt if the reader knows, now.
+      Otherwise, I should have preferred Monk Bar or Micklegate Bar, as being
+      more like those I was used to in the theatre. But we came back gladly to
+      Bootham Bar, holding that a portcullis was equal any day to a barbican,
+      and feeling as if we had got home in the more familiar neighborhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were small shops in the Bootham, thread-and-needle stores, newspaper
+      stores, and provision stores mainly, which I affected, and there was one
+      united florist&rsquo;s and fruiterer&rsquo;s which I particularly liked
+      because of the conversability of the proprietor. He was a stout man, of a
+      vinous complexion, with what I should call here, where our speech is
+      mostly uncouth, an educated accent, though with few and wandering
+      aspirates in it. Him I visited every morning to buy for my breakfast one
+      of those Spanish melons which they have everywhere in England, and which
+      put our native cantaloupes to shame; and we always fell into a little talk
+      over our transaction of fourpence or sixpence, as the case might be. After
+      I had confided that I was an American, he said one day, &ldquo;Ah, the
+      Americans are clever people.&rdquo; Then he added, &ldquo;I hope you won&rsquo;t
+      mind my saying it, sir, but I think their ladies are rather harder than
+      our English ladies, sir.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; I eagerly assented. &ldquo;How do you mean? Sharper?
+      Keener?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, not just that, sir.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;More practical? More business-like?&rdquo; I pursued.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, I shouldn&rsquo;t like to say that, sir. But&mdash;they seem
+      rather harder, sir; at least, judging from what I see of them in York,
+      sir. Rather harder, sir.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We remained not the less friends with that mystery between us; and I
+      bought my last melon of him on my last morning, when the early September
+      had turned somewhat sharply chill. That turn made me ask what the winter
+      was in York, and he boasted it very cold, with ice and snow aplenty, and
+      degrees of frost much like our own. But apparently those York women
+      resisted it and remained of a tenderness which contrasted to their
+      advantage with the summer hardness of our women.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It was a pleasure, which I should be glad to share with the reader, to
+      lose one&rsquo;s self in the streets of York. They were all kinds of
+      streets except straight, and they seemed not to go anywhere except for the
+      joke of bringing the wayfarer unexpectedly back to, or near, his
+      starting-point and far from his goal. The blame of their vagariousness, if
+      it was a fault, is put upon the Danes, who found York when they captured
+      it very rectangular, for so the Romans built it, and so the Angles kept
+      it; but nothing would serve the Danes but to crook its streets and call
+      them gates, so that the real gates of the city have to be called bars, or
+      else the stranger might take them for streets. If he asked another
+      wayfarer, he could sometimes baffle the streets, and get to the point he
+      aimed at, but, whether he did or not, he could always amuse himself in
+      them; they would take a friendly interest in him, and show him the old
+      houses and churches which the American stranger prefers. They abound in
+      the poorer sorts of buildings, of course, just as they do in the poorer
+      sorts of people, but in their simpler courts and squares and expanses they
+      have often dignified mansions of that Georgian architecture which seems
+      the last word in its way, and which is known here in our older edifices as
+      there in their newer. Some of them are said to have &ldquo;richly carved
+      ceilings, wainscoted, panelled rooms, chimneypieces with paintings framed
+      in the over-mantel, dentilled cornices, and pedimented doors,&rdquo; and I
+      could well believe it, as I passed them with an envious heart. There were
+      gardens behind these mansions which hung their trees over the spiked
+      coping of their high-shouldered walls and gates, and sequestered I know
+      not what damp social events in their flowery and leafy bounds.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0091}.jpg" alt="{0091}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0091}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      At times I distinctly wished to know something of the life of York, but I
+      was not in the way of it. The nearest to an acquaintance I had there,
+      besides my critical fruiterer, was the actor whose name I recognized on
+      his bills as that of a brave youth who had once dramatized a novel of
+      mine, and all too briefly played the piece, and who was now to come to
+      York for a week of Shakespeare. Perhaps I could not forgive him the
+      recrudescence; at any rate, I did not try to see him, and there was no
+      other social chance for me, except as I could buy in for a few glimpses at
+      the tidy confectioners&rsquo;, where persons of civil condition resorted
+      for afternoon tea. Even to these one could not speak, and I could only do
+      my best in a little mercenary conversation with the bookseller about York
+      histories. The bookstores were not on our scale, and generally the shops
+      in York were not of the modern department type, but were perhaps the
+      pleasanter for that reason.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In my earlier wanderings I made the acquaintance of a most agreeable
+      market-place, stretching the length of two squares, which on a Saturday
+      afternoon I found filled with every manner of bank and booth and canopied
+      counter, three deep, and humming pleasantly with traffic in everything one
+      could eat, drink, wear, or read; there seemed as many book-stalls as
+      fruit-stalls. What I noted equally with the prettiness of the abounding
+      flowers was the mild kindness of the market-people&rsquo;s manners and
+      their extreme anxiety to state exactly the quality of the things they had
+      for sale. They seemed incapable of deceit, but I do not say they really
+      were so. My own transactions were confined to the purchase of some
+      golden-gage plums, and I advise the reader rather to buy greengages; the
+      other plums practised the deception in their looks which their venders
+      abhorred.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I wandered in a perfectly contemporary mood through the long ranks and
+      lanes of the marketplace, and did not know till afterward that at one end
+      of it, called the Pavement, the public executions used to take place for
+      those great or small occasions which brought folks to the block or
+      scaffold in the past. I had later some ado to verify the dismal fact from
+      a cluster of people before a tavern who seemed to be taking bets for the
+      Doncaster Week, and I could hardly keep them from booking me for this
+      horse or that when I merely wanted to know whether it was on a certain
+      spot the Earl of Northumberland had his head cut off for leading a rising
+      against Henry IV.; or some such execution.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What riches of story has not York to browbeat withal the storyless
+      New-Yorker who visits her! That Henry IV. was he whom I had lately seen
+      triumphing near Shrewsbury in the final battle of the Roses, where the Red
+      was so bloodily set above the White; and it was his poetic fancy to have
+      Northumberland, when he bade him come to York, pass through the gateway on
+      which the head of his son, Hotspur Harry, was festering. No wonder the
+      earl led a rising against his liege, who had first mercifully meant to
+      imprison him for life, and then more mercifully pardoned him. But there
+      seems to have been fighting up and down the centuries from the beginning,
+      in York, interspersed with praying and wedding and feasting. After the
+      citizens drove out Conqueror William&rsquo;s garrison, and Earl Waltheof
+      provided against the Normans&rsquo; return by standing at the castle gate
+      and chopping their heads off with his battle-axe as they came forth,
+      William efficaciously devastated the city and the country as far as
+      Durham. His son William gave it a church, and that &ldquo;worthy peer,&rdquo;
+      King Stephen, a hospital. In his time the archbishop and barons of York
+      beat the Scotch hard by, and the next Scotch king had to do homage to
+      Henry II. at York for his kingdom. Henry III. married his sister at York
+      to one Scotch king and his daughter to that king&rsquo;s successor. Edward
+      I. and his queen Eleanor honored with their presence the translation of
+      St. William&rsquo;s bones to the Minster; Edward II. retreated from his
+      defeat at Bannockburn to York, and Edward III. was often there for a king&rsquo;s
+      varied occasions of fighting and feasting. Weak Henry VI. and his wilful
+      Margaret, after their defeat at Towton by Edward IV., escaped from the
+      city just in time, and Edward entered York under his own father&rsquo;s
+      head on Micklegate Bar. Richard III. was welcomed there before his rout
+      and death at Bosworth, and was truly mourned by the citizens. Henry VII.
+      wedded Elizabeth, the &ldquo;White Rose of York,&rdquo; and afterward
+      visited her city; Mary, Queen of Scots, was once in hiding there, and her
+      uncouth son stayed two nights in York on his way to be crowned James I. in
+      London. His son, Charles I., was there early in his reign, and touched
+      many for the king&rsquo;s evil; later, he was there again, but could not
+      cure the sort of king&rsquo;s evil which raged past all magic in the
+      defeat of his followers at Marston Moor by Cromwell. The city yielded to
+      the Puritans, whose temperament had already rather characterized it. James
+      II., as Duke of York, made it his brief sojourn; &ldquo;proud Cumberland,&rdquo;
+      returning from Culloden after the defeat of the Pretender, visited the
+      city and received its freedom for destroying the last hope of the Stuarts;
+      perhaps the twenty-two rebels who were then put to death in York were
+      executed in the very square where those wicked men thought I was wanting
+      to play the horses. The reigning family has paid divers visits to the
+      ancient metropolis, which was the capital of Britain before London was
+      heard of. The old prophecy of her ultimate primacy must make time if it is
+      to fulfil itself and increase York&rsquo;s seventy-two thousand beyond
+      London&rsquo;s six million.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IX
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I should be at a loss to say why its English memories haunted my York less
+      than the Roman associations of the place. They form, however, rather a
+      clutter of incidents, whereas the few spreading facts of Hadrian&rsquo;s
+      stay, the deaths of Severus and Constantius, and the election of
+      Constantine, his son, enlarge themselves to the atmospheric compass of the
+      place, but leave a roominess in which the fancy may more commodiously orb
+      about. I was on terms of more neighborly intimacy with the poor Punic
+      emperor than with any one else in York, doubtless because, when he fell
+      sick, he visited the temple of Bellona near Bootham Bar, and paid his
+      devotions unmolested, let us hope, by any prevision of the misbehavior of
+      his son Caracalla (whose baths I had long ago visited at Rome) in killing
+      his other son Geta. Everywhere I could be an early Christian, in company
+      with Constantine, in whom the instinct of political Christianity must have
+      begun to stir as soon as he was chosen emperor. But I dare say I heard the
+      muted tramp of the Sixth Legion about the Yorkish streets above all other
+      martial sounds because I stayed as long as Doncaster Week would let me in
+      the railway hotel, which so many of their bones made room for when the
+      foundations of it were laid, with those of the adherent station. Their
+      bones seem to have been left there, after the disturbance, but their
+      sepulchres were respectfully transferred to the museum of the
+      Philosophical Society, in the grounds where the ruins of St. Mary&rsquo;s
+      Abbey rise like fragments of pensive music or romantic verse, inviting the
+      moonlight and the nightingale, but, wanting these, make shift with the
+      noonday and the babies in perambulators neglected by nurse-girls reading
+      novels.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0097}.jpg" alt="{0097}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0097}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      The babies and the nurses are not allowed in the museum of antiquities,
+      which is richer in Roman remains than any that one sees outside of Italy.
+      There are floors of mosaic, large and perfect, taken from the villas which
+      people are always digging up in the neighborhood of York, and, from the
+      graves uncovered in the railway excavations, coffins of lead and stone for
+      civilians, and of rude tiles for the soldiers of the Sixth Legion; the
+      slaves were cast into burial-pits of tens and twenties and left to
+      indiscriminate decay till they should be raised in the universal
+      incorruption. Probably the slaves were the earliest Christians at York;
+      certainly the monuments are pagan, as the inmates of the tombs must have
+      been. Some of the monuments bear inscriptions from loving wives and
+      husbands to the partners they have lost, and some of the stone coffins are
+      those of children. It is all infinitely touching, and after two thousand
+      years the heart aches for the fathers and mothers who laid their little
+      ones away in these hard cradles for their last sleep. Faith changes, but
+      constant death remains the same, and life is not very different in any
+      age, when it comes to the end. The Roman exiles who had come so far to
+      hold my British ancestors in subjection to their alien rule seemed
+      essentially not only of the same make as me, but the same civilization.
+      Their votive altars and inscriptions to other gods expressed a human piety
+      of like anxiety and helplessness with ours, and called to a like
+      irresponsive sky. A hundred witnesses of their mortal state&mdash;jars and
+      vases and simple household utensils&mdash;fill the shelves of the museum;
+      but the most awful, the most beautiful appeal of the past is in that mass
+      of dark auburn hair which is kept here in a special urn and uncovered for
+      your supreme emotion. It is equally conjectured to be the hair of a Roman
+      lady or of a British princess, but is of a young girl certainly, dressed
+      twenty centuries ago for the tomb in which it was found, and still faintly
+      lucent with the fashionable unguent of the day, and kept in form by pins
+      of jet. One thinks of the little, slender hands that used to put them
+      there, and of the eyes that confronted themselves in the silver mirror
+      under the warm shadow that the red-gold mass cast upon the white forehead.
+      This sanctuary of the past was the most interesting place in that most
+      interesting city of York, and the day of our first visit a princess of New
+      York sat reading a book in the midst of it, waiting for the rain to be
+      over, which was waiting for her to come out and then begin again. We knew
+      her from having seen her at the station in relation to some trunks bearing
+      her initials and those of her native city; and she could be about the age
+      of the York princess or young Roman lady whose hair was kept in the urn
+      hard by.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      X
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There is in York a little, old, old church, whose dear and reverend name I
+      have almost forgotten, if ever I knew it, but I think it is Holy Trinity
+      Goodramgate, which divides the heart of my adoration with the Minster. We
+      came to it quite by accident, one of our sad September afternoons, after
+      we had been visiting the Guildhall, Venetianly overhanging the canal calm
+      of the Ouse, and very worthy to be seen for its York histories in stained
+      glass. The custodian had surprised us and the gentlemen of the committee
+      by taking us into the room where they were investigating the claims of the
+      registered voters to the suffrage; and so, much entertained and
+      instructed, we issued forth, and, passing by the church in which Guy
+      Fawkes was baptized, only too ineffectually, we came quite unexpectedly
+      upon Holy Trinity Goodramgate, if that and not another is indeed its name.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It stands sequestered in a little leafy and grassy space of its own, with
+      a wall hardly overlooked on one side by low stone cottages, the immemorial
+      homes of rheumatism and influenza. The church had the air of not knowing
+      that it is of Perpendicular and Decorated Gothic, with a square,
+      high-shouldered tower, as it bulks up to a very humble height from the
+      turf to the boughs overhead, or that it has a nice girl sketching its
+      doorway, where a few especially favored weddings and funerals may enter.
+      It is open once a year for service, and when the tourist will, or can, for
+      the sight of the time-mellowed, beautiful stained glass of its eastward
+      window. The oaken pews are square and high-shouldered, like the low church
+      tower; and, without, the soft yellow sandstone is crumbling away from the
+      window traceries. The church did not look as if it felt itself a thousand
+      years old, and perhaps it is not; but I never was in a place where I
+      seemed so like a ghost of that antiquity. I had a sense of haunting it, in
+      the inner twilight and the outer sunlight, where a tender wind was
+      stirring the leaves of its embowering trees and scattering them on the
+      graves of my eleventh and twelfth century contemporaries.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We chose the sunniest morning we could for our visit to Clifford&rsquo;s
+      Tower, which remains witness of the Norman castle the Conqueror built and
+      rebuilt to keep the Danish-Anglian-Roman-British town in awe. But the
+      tower was no part of the original castle, and only testifies of it by
+      hearsay. That was built by Roger de Clifford, who suffered death with his
+      party chief, the Earl of Lancaster, when Edward of York took the city, and
+      it is mainly memorable as the refuge of the Jews whom the Christians had
+      harried out of their homes. They had grown in numbers and riches, when the
+      Jew-hate of 1190 broke out in England, as from time to time the Jew-hate
+      breaks out in Russia now, to much the same cruel effect. They were
+      followed and besieged in the castle, and, seeing that they must be
+      captured, they set fire to the place, and five hundred slew themselves.
+      Some that promised to be Christians came out and were killed by their
+      brethren in Christ. In New York the Christians have grown milder, and now
+      they only keep the Jews out of their clubs and their homes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0103}.jpg" alt="{0103}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0103}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      The Clifford Tower leans very much to one side, so that as you ascend it
+      for the magnificent view from the top you have to incline yourself the
+      other way, as you do in the Tower of Pisa, to help it keep its balance.
+      The morning of our visit, so gay in its forgetfulness of the tragical
+      past, we found the place in charge of an old soldier, an Irishman who had
+      learned, as custodian, a professional compassion for those poor Jews of
+      nine hundred years ago, and, being moved by our confession of our
+      nationality, owned to three &ldquo;nevvies&rdquo; in New Haven. So small
+      is the world and so closely knit in the ties of a common humanity and a
+      common citizenship, native and adoptive!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The country around York looked so beautiful from Clifford&rsquo;s Tower
+      that we would not be satisfied till we had seen it closer, and we chose a
+      bright, cool September afternoon for our drive out of the town and over
+      the breezy, high levels which surround it. The first British capital could
+      hardly have been more nobly placed, and one could not help grieving that
+      the Ouse should have indolently lost York that early dignity by letting
+      its channel fill up with silt and spoil its navigation. The Thames managed
+      better for York&rsquo;s upstart rival London, and yet the Ouse is not
+      destitute of sea or river craft. These were of both steam and sail, and I
+      myself have witnessed the energy with which the reluctance of the indolent
+      stream is sometimes overcome. I do not suppose that anywhere else, when
+      the wind is low, is a vessel madly hurled through the water at a mile an
+      hour by means of a rope tied to its mast and pulled by a fatherly old
+      horse under the intermittent drivership of two boys whom he could hardly
+      keep to the work. I loved the banks of a stream where one could see such a
+      triumph of man over nature, and where nature herself was so captivating.
+      All that grassy and shady neighborhood seemed a public promenade, where on
+      a Sunday one could see the lower middle classes in their best and
+      brightest, and it had for all its own the endearing and bewitching name of
+      Ings. Why cannot we have Ings by the Hudson side?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0005" id="link2H_4_0005"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      TWO YORKISH EPISODES
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Certainly I had not come to York, as certainly I would not have gone
+      anywhere, for battle-fields, but becoming gradually sensible in that city
+      that the battle of Marston Moor was fought a few miles away, and my enemy
+      Charles I. put to one of his worst defeats there, I bought a third-class
+      ticket and ran out to the place one day for whatever emotion awaited me
+      there.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      At an English station you are either overwhelmed with transportation, or
+      you are without any except such as you were born with, and at the station
+      for Marston Moor I asked for a fly in vain. But it was a most walkable
+      afternoon, and the pleasant road into the region which the station-master
+      indicated as that I was seeking invited the foot by its level stretch,
+      sometimes under wayside trees, but mostly between open fields, newly
+      reaped and still yellow with their stubble, or green with the rowen
+      clover. Sometimes it ran straight and sometimes it curved, but it led so
+      rarely near any human habitation that one would rather not have met any
+      tramps beside one&rsquo;s self on it. Presently I overtook one, a gentle
+      old farm-wife, a withered blonde, whom I helped with the bundles she bore
+      in either hand, in the hope that she could tell me whether I was near
+      Marston Moor or not. But she could tell me only, what may have been of
+      higher human interest, that her husband had the grass farm of a hundred
+      and fifty acres, which we were coming to, for seventy-five pounds a year;
+      and they had their own cattle, sheep, and horses, and were well content
+      with themselves. She excused herself for not knowing more than vaguely of
+      the battle-field, as not having been many years in the neighborhood; and
+      being now come to a gate in the fields, she thanked me and took her way up
+      a grassy path to the pleasant farmhouse I saw in the distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have been about this time that it rained, having shone long enough
+      for English weather, and it hardly held up before I was overtaken by a
+      friendly youth on a bicycle, whom I stayed with the question uppermost in
+      my mind. He promptly got off his wheel to grapple with the problem. He was
+      a comely young fellow, an artisan of some sort from a neighboring town,
+      and he knew the country well, but he did not know where my lost
+      battle-field was. He was sure that it was near by: but he was sure there
+      was no monument to mark the spot. Then we parted friends, with many polite
+      expressions, and he rode on and I walked on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a mile and more I met no other wayfarer, and as I felt that it was
+      time to ask for Marston Moor again, I was very glad to be overtaken by a
+      gentleman driving in a dog-cart, with his pretty young daughter on the
+      wide seat with him. He halted at sight of the elderly pilgrim, and
+      hospitably asked if he could not give him a lift, alleging that there was
+      plenty of room. He was interested in my search, which he was not able
+      definitely to promote, but he believed that if I would drive with him to
+      his place I could find the battle-field, and, anyhow, I could get a trap
+      back from the The Sun. I pleaded the heat I was in from walking, and the
+      danger for an old fellow of taking cold in a drive through the cool air;
+      and then, as old fellows do, we bantered each other about our ages, each
+      claiming to be older than the other, and the kind, sweet young girl sat
+      listening with that tolerance of youth for the triviality of age which is
+      so charming. When he could do no more, he said he was sorry, and wished me
+      luck, and drove on; and I being by this time tired with my three miles&rsquo;
+      tramp, took advantage of a wayside farmhouse, the first in all the
+      distance, and went in and asked for a cup of tea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The farm-wife, who came in out of her back garden to answer my knock,
+      pleaded regretfully that her fire was down; but she thought I could get
+      tea at the next house; and she was very conversable about the
+      battle-field. She did not know just where it was, but she was sure it was
+      quite a mile farther on; and at that I gave up the hope of it along with
+      the tea. This is partly the reader&rsquo;s loss, for I have no doubt I
+      could have been very graphic about it if I had found it; but as for
+      Marston Moor, I feel pretty certain that if it ever existed it does not
+      now. A moor, as I understand, implies a sort of wildness, but nothing
+      could be more domestic than the peaceful fields between which I had come
+      so far, and now easily found my way back to the station. Easily, I say,
+      but there was one point where the road forked, though I was sure it had
+      not forked before, and I felt myself confronted with some sort, any sort,
+      of exciting adventure. By taking myself firmly in hand, and saying,
+      &ldquo;It was yonder to the left where I met my kind bicycler, and we
+      vainly communed of my evanescent battle-field,&rdquo; and so keeping on, I
+      got safely to the station with nothing more romantic in my experience than
+      a thrilling apprehension.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I quite forgot Marston Moor in my self-gratulation and my recognition of
+      the civility from every one which had so ineffectively abetted my search.
+      Simple and gentle, how hospitable they had all been to my vain inquiry,
+      and how delicately they had forborne to visit the stranger with the irony
+      of the average American who is asked anything, especially anything he does
+      not know! I went thinking that the difference was a difference between
+      human nature long mellowed to its conditions, and human nature rasped on
+      its edges and fretted by novel circumstances to a provisional harshness. I
+      chose to fancy that unhuman nature sympathized with the English mood; in
+      the sheep bleating from the pastures I heard the note of Wordsworth&rsquo;s
+      verse; and by the sky, hung in its low blue with rough, dusky clouds, I
+      was canopied as with a canvas of Constable&rsquo;s.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the more pity, then, that at the station a shooting party,
+      approaching from the other quarter with their servants and guns and dogs,
+      and their bags of hares and partridges, should have given English life
+      another complexion to the wanderer so willing to see it always rose color.
+      The gunners gained the station platform first, and at once occupied the
+      benches, strewing all the vacant places with their still bleeding prey. I
+      did not fail of the opportunity to see in them the arrogance of class,
+      which I had hitherto so vainly expected, and I disabled their looks by
+      finding them as rude as their behavior. How different they were from the
+      kind bicycler, or the gentleman in the dog-cart, or either one of the
+      farm-wives who sorrowed so civilly not to know where my lost battle-field
+      was!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In England, it is always open to the passenger to enforce a claim to his
+      share of the public facilities, but I chose to go into the licensed
+      victualler&rsquo;s next the station and sit down to a peaceable cup of tea
+      rather than contest a place on that bloody benching; and so I made the
+      acquaintance of an interior out of literature, such as my beloved Thomas
+      Hardy likes to paint. On a high-backed rectangular settle rising against
+      the wall, and almost meeting in front of the comfortable range, sat a
+      company of rustics, stuffing themselves with cold meat, washed down with
+      mugs of ale, and cozily talking. They gained indefinitely in my interest
+      from being served by a lame woman, with a rhythmical limp, and I hope it
+      was not for my demerit that I was served apart in the chillier parlor,
+      when I should have liked so much to stay and listen to the rustic tale or
+      talk. The parlor was very depressingly papered, but on its walls I had the
+      exalted company of his Majesty the King, their Royal Highnesses the Prince
+      and Princess of Wales, the late Premier, the Marquis of Salisbury, and,
+      for no assignable reason except a general fitness for high society, the
+      twelve Apostles in Da Vinci&rsquo;s <i>Last Supper</i>, together with an
+      appropriate view of York Minster.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I do not pretend this search for the battle-field of Marston Moor was the
+      most exciting episode of my stay in York. In fact, I think it was much
+      surpassed in a climax of dramatic poignancy incident to our excursion to
+      Bishopsthorpe, down the Ouse, on one of the cosey little steamers which
+      ply the stream without unreasonably crowding it against its banks. It was
+      a most silvery September afternoon when we started from the quay at York,
+      and after escaping from embarkment on a boat going in the wrong direction,
+      began, with no unseemly swiftness, to scuttle down the current. It was a
+      perfect voyage, as perfect as any I ever made on the Mississippi, the
+      Ohio, the St. Lawrence, or the Hudson, on steamers in whose cabins our
+      little boat would have lost itself. We had a full but not crowded company
+      of passengers, overflowing into a skiff at our stern, in which a father
+      and mother, with three women friends, preferred the high excitement of
+      being towed to Bishopsthorpe, where it seemed that the man of the party
+      knew the gardener. With each curve of the river and with each remove we
+      got the city in more and more charming retrospective, till presently its
+      roofs and walls and spires and towers were lost in the distance, and we
+      were left to the sylvan or pastoral loveliness of the low shores. Here and
+      there at a pleasant interval from the river a villa rose against a
+      background of rounded tree tops, with Lombardy poplars picking themselves
+      out before it, but for the most part the tops of the banks, with which we
+      stood even on our deck, retreated from the waterside willows in levels of
+      meadow-land, where white and red cows were grazing, and now and then young
+      horses romping away from groups of their elders. It was all dear and kind
+      and sweet, with a sort of mid-Western look in its softness (as the English
+      landscape often has), and the mud-banks were like those of my native Ohio
+      Valley rivers. The effect was heightened, on our return, by an aged and
+      virtuously poor (to all appearance) flageolet and cornet band, playing <i>&lsquo;Way
+      down upon the Suwanee River</i>, while the light played in &ldquo;ditties
+      no-tone&rdquo; over the groves and pastures of the shore, and the shadows
+      stretched themselves luxuriously out as if for a long night&rsquo;s sleep.
+      There has seldom been such a day since I began to grow old; a soft
+      September gale ruffled and tossed the trees finely, and a subtle Italian
+      quality mixed with the American richness of the sunshiny air; so that I
+      thought we reached Bishopsthorpe only too soon, and I woke from a pleasant
+      reverie to be told that the steamer could not land with us, but we must be
+      taken ashore in the small boat which we saw putting out for us from its
+      moorings. To this day I do not know why the steamer could not land, but
+      perhaps the small boat had a prescriptive right in the matter. At any
+      rate, it was vigorously manned by a woman, who took tuppence from each of
+      us for her service, and presently earned it by the interest she showed in
+      our getting to the Archbishop&rsquo;s palace, or villa, the right way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0116}.jpg" alt="{0116}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0116}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      So we went round by an alluring road to its forking, where, looking up to
+      the left, we could see a pretty village behind Lombardy poplars, and
+      coming down toward us in a victoria for their afternoon drive, two
+      charmingly dressed ladies, with bright parasols, and looking very
+      county-family, as we poor Americans imagine such things out of English
+      fiction. We entered the archiepiscopal grounds through a sympathetic
+      Gothic screen, as I will call the overture to the Gothic edifice in my
+      defect of architectural terminology, though perhaps gateway would be
+      simpler; and found ourselves in the garden, and in the company of those
+      people we had towed down behind our steamer. They were with their friend,
+      the gardener, and, claiming their acquaintance as fellow-passengers, we
+      made favor with him to see the house. The housekeeper, or some understudy
+      of hers, who received us, said the family were away, but she let us follow
+      her through. That is more than I will let the reader do, for I know the
+      duty of the cultivated American to the intimacies of the gentle English
+      life; it is only with the simple life that I ever make free; there, I own,
+      I have no scruple. But I will say (with my back turned conscientiously to
+      the interior) that nothing could be lovelier than the outlook from the
+      dining-room, and the whole waterfront of the house, on the wavy and
+      willowy Ouse, and that I would willingly be many times an archbishop to
+      have that prospect at all my meals.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We despatched our visit so promptly that we got back to our boat-woman&rsquo;s
+      cottage a full hour before our steamer was to call for us. She had an
+      afternoon fire kindled in her bright range, from the oven of which came
+      already the odor of agreeable baking. Upon this hint we acted, and asked
+      if tea were possible. It was, and jam sandwiches as well, or if we
+      preferred buttered tea-cake, with or without currants, to jam sandwiches,
+      there would be that presently. We preferred both, and we sat down in that
+      pleasant parlor-kitchen, and listened, till the tea-cake came out of the
+      oven and was split open and buttered smoking hot, to a flow of delightful
+      and instructive talk. For our refection we paid sixpence each, but for our
+      edification we are still, and hope ever to be, in debt. Our hostess was of
+      a most cheerful philosophy, such as could not be bought of most modern
+      philosophers for money. The flour for our tea-cakes, she said, was a
+      shilling fivepence a stone, &ldquo;And not too much for growing and
+      grinding it, and all.&rdquo; Every week-day morning she rose at half-past
+      four, and got breakfast for her boys, who then rode their bicycles, or, in
+      the snow, walked, all the miles of our voyage into York, where they worked
+      in the railway shops. No, they did not belong to any union; the railway
+      men did not seem to care for it; only a &ldquo;benefit union.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She kept the house for her family, and herself ready to answer every hail
+      from the steamer; but in her mellow English content, which was not stupid
+      or sodden, but clever and wise, it was as if it were she, rather than the
+      archbishop, whose nature expressed itself in a motto on one of the palace
+      walls, &ldquo;Blessed be the Lord who loadeth us with blessings every day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the range, warming to its work, had made her kitchen-parlor a little
+      too hot to hold us, she hospitably suggested the river shore as cooler,
+      where she knew a comfortable log we could sit on. Thither she presently
+      followed when the steamer&rsquo;s whistle sounded, and held her boat for
+      us to get safely in. The most nervous of our party offered the reflection,
+      as she sculled us out into the stream to overhaul the pausing steamer,
+      that she must find the ferry business very shattering to the nerves, and
+      she said,
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but it&rsquo;s nothing to a murder case I was on, once.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, what murder, what murder?&rdquo; we palpitated back; and both
+      of us forgot the steamer, so that it almost ran us down, while our
+      ferrywoman began again:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A man shot a nurse&mdash;There! Throw that line, will you?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he, who ought to have thrown the line for her, in his distraction let
+      her drop her oar and throw the line herself, and then we scrambled aboard
+      without hearing any more of the murder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is the climax I have been working up to, and I call it a fine one; as
+      good as a story to be continued ever ended an instalment with.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0006" id="link2H_4_0006"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      The Doncaster Races lured us from our hotel at York, on the first day, as
+      I had dimly foreboded they would. In fact, if there had been no lure, I
+      might have gone in search of temptation, for in a world where sins are apt
+      to be ugly, a horse-race is so beautiful that if one loves beauty he can
+      practise an aesthetic virtue by sinning in that sort. So I made myself a
+      pretence of profit as well as pleasure, and in going to Doncaster I
+      feigned the wish chiefly to compare its high event with that of Saratoga.
+      I had no association with the place save horse-racing, and having missed
+      Ascot and Derby Day, I took my final chance in pursuit of knowledge&mdash;I
+      said to myself, &ldquo;Not mere amusement&rdquo;&mdash;and set out for
+      Doncaster unburdened by the lightest fact concerning the place.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I learned nothing of it when there, but I have since learned, from divers
+      trustworthy sources, that Doncaster is the Danum of Antoninus and the Dona
+      Ceaster of the Saxons, and that it is not only on the line of the
+      Northeastern Railway, but also on that famous Watling Street which from
+      the earliest Saxon time has crossed the British continent from sea to sea,
+      and seems to impress most of the cities north and south into a conformity
+      with its line, like a map of the straightest American railway routes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unless my ignorance has been abused, nothing remarkable has happened at
+      Doncaster in two thousand years, but this is itself a distinction in that
+      eventful England where so many things have happened elsewhere. It is the
+      market town of a rich farming region, and has notable manufactures of iron
+      and brass, of sacking and linen, of spun flax and of agricultural machines
+      and implements. Otherwise, it is important only for its races, which began
+      there three hundred years ago, and especially for its St. Leger Day, of
+      which Lieutenant-General St. Leger became the patron saint in 1778, though
+      he really established his Day two years earlier.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Doncaster is a mighty pleasant, friendly, rather modern, and commonplacely
+      American-looking town, with two-story trams gently ambling up and down its
+      chief avenues, in the leisurely English fashion, and all of more or less
+      arrival and departure at the race-grounds. In our company the reader will
+      have our appetites for lunch, and if he will take his chance with us in
+      the first simple place away from the station, he will help us satisfy them
+      very wholesomely and agreeably at boards which seem festively set up for
+      the occasion, and spread with hot roast-beef and the plain vegetables
+      which accompany the national dish in its native land; or he can have the
+      beef cold, or have cold lamb or chicken cold. His fellow-lunchers will be,
+      as he may like well enough to fancy, of somewhat lower degree than
+      himself, but they will all seem very respectable, and when they come out
+      together, they will all be equalized in the sudden excitement which has
+      possessed itself of the street, and lined the curbstones up and down with
+      spectators, their bodies bent forward, and their faces turned in the
+      direction of the station.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The excitement is caused by the coming of the King; and I wish that I
+      could present that event in just its sincere unimpressiveness. I have
+      assisted at several such events on the Continent, where, especially in
+      Germany, they are heralded as they are in the theatre, with a blare of
+      trumpets, and a sensation in the populace and the attendant military
+      little short of an ague fit. There, as soon as the majesties mount into
+      their carriages from the station, they drive off as swiftly as their
+      horses can trot, and their subjects, who have been waiting for hours to
+      see them, make what they can of a meagre half-minute&rsquo;s glimpse of
+      them. But how different was the behavior of that easy-going Majesty of
+      England! As soon as I heard that he was coming, I perceived how anxious I
+      had been in the half-year of my English sojourn to see him, and how
+      bitterly I should have been disappointed to leave his realms without it.
+      All kings are bad, I knew that well enough; but I also knew that some
+      kings are not so bad as others, and I had been willing to accept at their
+      face the golden opinions of this King, which, almost without exception,
+      his lieges seemed to hold. Of course it is not hard to think well of a
+      king if you are under him, just as it is not hard to think ill of him if
+      you are not under him; but there is no use being bigotedly republican when
+      there is nothing to be got by it, and I own the fact that his subjects
+      like him willingly. Probably no man in his kingdom understands better than
+      Edward VII. that he is largely a form, and that the more a form he is the
+      more conformable he is to the English ideal of a monarch. But no
+      Englishman apparently knows better than he when to leave off being a form
+      and become a man, and he has endeared himself to his people from time to
+      time by such inspirations. He is reputed on all hands to be a man of great
+      good sense; if he is ever fooled it is not by himself, but by the system
+      which he is no more a part of than the least of his subjects. If he will
+      let a weary old man or a delicate woman stand indefinitely before him, he
+      is no more to blame for that than for speaking English with a trace of
+      German in his <i>th</i> sounds; he did not invent his origins or his
+      traditions. Personally, having had it out with life, he is as amiable and
+      as unceremonious as a king may be. He shares, as far as he can, the great
+      and little interests of his people. He has not, so far as noted, the gifts
+      of some of his sisters, but he has much of his mother&rsquo;s steadfast
+      wisdom, and his father&rsquo;s instinct for the right side in considerable
+      questions; and he has his father&rsquo;s prescience of the psychological
+      moment for not bothering. Of course, he is a fetish; no Englishman can
+      deny that the kingship is an idolatry; but he is a fetish with an uncommon
+      share of the common man&rsquo;s divinity. The system which provides him
+      for the people provides them the best administration in the world, always
+      naturally in the hands of their superiors, social and political; but we
+      could be several times rottener than we administratively are, and still be
+      incalculably reasonabler, as republicans, than those well-governed
+      monarchists.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0126}.jpg" alt="{0126}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0126}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      Some of us are apt to forget the immense advantage which we have of the
+      monarchical peoples in having cast away the very name of King, for with
+      the name goes the nature of royalty and all that is under and around it.
+      But because we are largely a fond and silly folk, with a false conceit of
+      ourselves and others, we like to make up romances about the favor in which
+      thrones, municipalities, and powers hold us. Once it was the Tsar of
+      Russia who held us dear, and would do almost anything for Americans; now
+      it is the King of England who is supposed rather to prefer us to his own
+      people, and to delight to honor us. We attribute to him a feeling which a
+      little thought would teach, us was wholly our own, and which would be out
+      of nature if not out of reason with him. He is a man of sense, and not of
+      sentiment, and except as a wise politician he could have no affection for
+      a nation whose existence denies him. He is very civil to Americans; it is
+      part of a constitutional king&rsquo;s business to be civil to every one;
+      but he is probably not sentimental about us; and we need not be
+      sentimental about him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked like a man of sense, and not like a man of sentiment, that day
+      as he drove through the Doncaster street on his way to the sport he loves
+      beyond any other sport. He sat with three other gentlemen on the sidewise
+      seats of the trap, preceded by outriders, which formed the simple turnout
+      of the greatest prince in the world. He was at the end on the right, and
+      he showed fully as stout as he was, in the gray suit he wore, while he
+      lifted his gray top-hat now and then, bowing casually, almost absently, to
+      the spectators fringing, not too deeply, the sidewalks. He was very, very
+      stout, even after many seasons of Marienbad, and after the sufferings he
+      had lately undergone, and he was quite like the pictures and effigies of
+      him, down to those on the postage-stamps. He has a handsome face, still
+      bearded in the midst of a mostly clean-shaving nation, and with the white
+      hairs prevalent on the cheeks and temples; his head is bald atop, though
+      hardly from the uneasiness of wearing a crown.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was difficult to realize him for what he was, and in the unmilitary
+      keeping of a few policemen, he was not of the high histrionic presence
+      that those German majesties were. The good-natured crowd did not strain
+      itself in cheering, though it seemed to cheer cordially; and it did not
+      stay long after the trap tooled comfortably away. I then addressed myself
+      to a little knot of railway servants who lingered talking, and asked them
+      what some carriages were still waiting for at the door of the station, and
+      one of them answered with a lightness you do not expect in England,
+      &ldquo;Oh, Lord This, and Lady That, and the Hon. Mr. I-don&rsquo;t-know-what&rsquo;s-his-name.&rdquo;
+      The others laughed at this ribald satire of the upper classes, and I
+      thought it safer to follow the King to the races lest I should hear worse
+      things of them.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The races were some miles away, and when we got to the tracks we did not
+      find their keeping very different from that of the Saratoga tracks,
+      although the crowd was both smarter and shabbier, and it had got to the
+      place through a town of tents and sheds, and a population of hucksters and
+      peddlers, giving an effect of permanency to the festivity such as a
+      solemnity of ours seldom has. When we bought our tickets we found, in the
+      familiarity with the event expected of us, that there was no one to show
+      us to our places; but by dint of asking we got to the Grand Stand, and
+      mounted to our seats, which, when we stood up from them, commanded a
+      wholly satisfactory prospect of the whole field.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I do not know the dimensions of the Doncaster track, or how far they
+      exceed those of the Saratoga track. Possibly one does not do its extent
+      justice because there is no track at Doncaster: there is nothing but a
+      green turf, with a certain course railed off on it. I hope the reader will
+      be as much surprised as I was to realize that the sport of horse-racing in
+      England gets its name of Turf from the fact that the races are run on the
+      grass, and not on the bare ground, as with us. We call the sport the Turf,
+      too, but that is because in this, as in so many other things, we lack
+      incentive and invention, and are fondly colonial and imitative; we ought
+      to call it the Dirt, for that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the
+      racing lacks the definition in England which our course gives, and when it
+      began, I missed the relief into which our track throws the bird-like sweep
+      of the horses as they skim the naked earth in the distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances the
+      thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so
+      scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the
+      shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so much
+      gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The crowd
+      thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see, and
+      bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with the
+      shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the
+      book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here.
+      With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins; but
+      I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at the
+      Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the horse
+      next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty close. By the
+      end of the third or how far they exceed those of the Saratoga track.
+      Possibly one does not do its extent justice because there is no track at
+      Doncaster: there is nothing but a green turf, with a certain course railed
+      off on it. I hope the reader will be as much surprised as I was to realize
+      that the sport of horse-racing in England gets its name of Turf from the
+      fact that the races are run on the grass, and not on the bare ground, as
+      with us. We call the sport the Turf, too, but that is because in this, as
+      in so many other things, we lack incentive and invention, and are fondly
+      colonial and imitative; we ought to call it the Dirt, for that is what it
+      is with us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the definition in England
+      which our course gives, and when it began, I missed the relief into which
+      our track throws the bird-like sweep of the horses as they skim the naked
+      earth in the distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I missed also the superfluity of jockeying which delays and enhances the
+      thrill of the start with us, and I thought the English were not so
+      scrupulous about an even start as we are. But, above all, I missed the
+      shining faces and the gleaming eyes of the black jockeys, who lend so much
+      gayety to our scene, where they seem born to it, if not of it. The crowd
+      thickened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see, and
+      bubbled over with the babble of multitudinous voices, crossed with the
+      shouts of the book-makers. Having failed to enter any bets with the
+      book-makers of The Pavement in York, I did not care to make them here.
+      With all my passion for racing, I never know or care which horse wins; but
+      I tried to enter into the joy of a diffident young fellow near me at the
+      Grand Stand rail, who was so proud of having guessed as winner the horse
+      next to the winner at the first race; it was coming pretty close. By the
+      end of the third race he had softened into something like confidence
+      toward me; certainly into conversability; such was the effect of my being
+      a dead-game sport, or looking it. But how account for the trustfulness of
+      the young woman on my other hand who wore her gold watch outside her
+      dress, and who turned to the elderly stranger for sympathy in a certain
+      supreme moment? This was when the crowd below crumpled suddenly together
+      like the crushing of paper and the sense of something tragically
+      mysterious in the distance clarified itself as the death of one of the
+      horses. It had dropped from heart-break in its tracks, as if shot, and
+      presently a string of young men and boys came dragging to some <i>spoliarium</i>
+      the long, slender body of the pretty creature over the turf which its
+      hoofs had beaten a moment before. Then it was that the girl, with the
+      watch on her breast, turned and asked, &ldquo;Isn&rsquo;t it sad?&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0132}.jpg" alt="{0132}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0132}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      She was probably not the daughter of a hundred earls, but there must have
+      been some such far-descended fair among the ladies who showed themselves
+      from time to time in the royal paddock across a little space from our
+      Grand Stand. The enclosure has no doubt a more technical name, which I
+      would call it by if I knew it, for I do not wish to be irreverent; but
+      paddock is very sporty, and it must serve my occasion. The King never
+      showed himself there at all, though much craned round for and eagerly
+      expected. But ladies and gentlemen moved about in the close, and stood and
+      talked together; very tall people, very easily straight and well set up,
+      very handsome, and very amiable-looking; they may have been really kind
+      and good, or they may have looked so to please the King and keep his
+      spirits up. I did not then, but I do now, realize that these were
+      courtiers, such as one has always read of, and were of very historical
+      quality in their attendance on the monarch. I trust it will not take from
+      the dignity of the fact if I note that several of the courtiers wore derby
+      hats, and one was in a sack coat and a topper. I am not sure what the
+      fairer reader will think if I tell that one of the ladies had on a dress
+      with a white body and crimson skirt and sleeves, and a vast black
+      picture-hat, and wore it with a charming air of authority.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The weather, in the excitement of the races, had not known whether it was
+      raining or not, but we feared its absent-mindedness, and at the end of the
+      third race we went away. It is not well to trust an English day too far;
+      this had begun with brilliant sunshine, but it dimmed as it wore on, and
+      we could not know that it was keeping for us the surprise of a very
+      refined sunset. My memory does not serve as to just how we had got out to
+      the race-ground; I think, from our being set down at the very gate, that
+      it was by hansom or by fly; but now we promised ourselves to walk back to
+      town. We did not actually do so; we went back most of the way by tram; but
+      we were the firmer about walking at the outset, because we presently found
+      ourselves in a lane of gypsy tents, where there was an alluring sight and
+      smell of frying fish and potatoes. In the midst of the refection, you
+      could have your fortune told, very favorably, for a very little money. All
+      up and down this happy avenue there went girls of several dozen sizes and
+      ages, crying a particular kind of taffy, proper to the day and place, and
+      never to be had on any other day in any other place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We had an hour before train-time, and we thought we would go and see the
+      Parish Church of Doncaster, which we had read was worth seeing. Our belief
+      was confirmed by a group of disappointed ladies in the churchyard, who
+      said it was a most beautiful church inside, but that they had not seen it
+      because it was shut. We proved the fact by trying the door, and then we
+      came away consoling ourselves with the scoff that it was probably closed
+      for the races. At the bookseller&rsquo;s, where we stopped to buy some
+      photographs of the interior of the church we had not seen, we lamented our
+      disappointment, and the salesman said, &ldquo;Perhaps it was closed for
+      the races.&rdquo; So our joke seemed to turn earnest, and on reflection it
+      did not surprise us in that England of close-knit unities where people and
+      prince are of one texture in their pleasures and devotions, and the Church
+      is hardly more national than the Turf.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      At Durham, which was my next excursion from York, I cannot claim,
+      therefore, that my mission was more serious because it almost solely
+      concerned the Church, or that it was more frivolous at Doncaster, where it
+      almost solely concerned the Turf. My train started in a fine mist that
+      turned to sun, but not before it had shown me with the local color, which
+      a gray light lends everything, a pack of hounds crossing a field near the
+      track with two huntsmen at their heels. They were not chasing, but running
+      leisurely, and with their flower-like, loose spread over the green, and
+      the pink-coated hunters on their brown mounts, they afforded a picture as
+      vivid and of as perfect semblance to all my visions of fox-hunting as I
+      could have asked. I had been hoping that I might see something of the
+      famous sport, almost as English as the Church or the Turf, and there,
+      suddenly and all unexpectedly, the sight fully and satisfyingly was. Now,
+      indeed, I felt that my impression of English society was complete, and
+      that I might go home and write novels of English high life, and do
+      something to redeem myself a little from the disgrace I had fallen into
+      with my fellow-plebeians by always writing of common Americans, like
+      themselves, and never <i>grandes dames</i> or ideal persons, or people in
+      the best society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But I did not want to go home at once, or turn back from going to Durham
+      through that pleasant landscape, where the mist hung between the trees
+      which seemed themselves only heavier bulks of mist. The wheat in some of
+      the fields was still uncut, and in others, where it had been gathered into
+      sheaves, the rooks by hundreds were noisily gleaning in the track of the
+      reapers. From this conventionally English keeping, I passed suddenly to
+      the sight of the gaunt, dry, gravelly bed of a wide river, such as I had
+      known in Central Italy, or the Middle West at home; and I realized once
+      again that England is no island of one simple complexion, but is a
+      condensed continent, with all continental varieties of feature in it. You
+      must cover thousands and thousands of miles in our tedious lengths and
+      breadths for the beauties and sublimities of scenery which you shall
+      gather from fewer hundreds in England; I have no doubt they have even
+      volcanoes there, but I did not see any, probably because the English are
+      so reticent, and hate to make a display of any sort.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It is because they are so, or possibly because of my ignorance, that I did
+      not know or at all imagine how magnificent the Cathedral of Durham is, or
+      what a matchless seat it has on the bluffs of the river, with depths of
+      woods below its front, tossing in the rich chill of the September wind. As
+      it takes flight for the heavens, to which its business is to invite the
+      thought, it seems to carry the earth with it, for if you climb those noble
+      heights, you find your feet still on the ground, in a most stately space
+      of open level between the cathedral and its neighbor castle, which alone
+      could be worthy of its high company.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The castle is Tudor, but the cathedral is beyond all other English
+      cathedrals, I believe, Norman, though to the naked eye it looks so Gothic,
+      and probably is. Here I will leave the reader with any pictures or
+      memories of it which he happens to have, for I have always held it a sin
+      to try describing architecture, or if not a sin, a bore. What chiefly
+      remains to me of my impression of Durham Cathedral is, strangely enough,
+      an objection: I did not like those decorated pillars, alternating with the
+      clustered columns of the interior, and I do not suppose I ever shall: the
+      spiral furrows, the zigzag and lozenge figures chiselled in their
+      surfaces, weakened them to the eye and seemed to trifle with their proud
+      bulk.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But to the castle of Durham I have no objection whatever. I should like to
+      live in it, as I should in all other Tudor houses, great or small, that I
+      saw, where, as I am constantly saying, a high ideal of comfort is
+      realized. It is almost as nobly placed as the cathedral, and it is
+      approached by a very stately courtyard, of like spacious effect with the
+      cathedral piazza. Inside it there is a kitchen of the sixteenth century,
+      with a company of neat serving-maids, too comely and young to be, perhaps,
+      of the same period, that gives the tourist a high sense of the luxury in
+      which the Bishop of Durham and the Judges of the Assize Courts live when
+      they are residents in the castle. One sees their apartments, dim and rich,
+      and darkly furnished, but not gloomily, both where they sleep and where
+      they eat, and flatteringly envies them in a willingness for the moment to
+      be a judge or a bishop for the sake of such a fit setting. There is also a
+      fine crypt, with a fine dining-hall and a black staircase of ancient oak,
+      and a gallery with classic busts, and other pictures worthy of wonder, let
+      alone a history from the time of William the Conqueror, who first fancied
+      a castle where it stands, down to the present day. The memory of such
+      successive guests as the Empress Matilda and Henry II. her son, King John,
+      Henry III., Edwards I., II., and III., Queen Philippa, Henry VI., and
+      James I., and Charles I., and Edward VII., abides in the guidebook, and
+      may be summoned from its page to the chambers of the beautiful old place
+      by any traveller intending impressions for literary use from a medieval
+      environment in perfect repair.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      One must be hard to satisfy if one is not satisfied with Durham Castle,
+      and its interior contented me as fully as the exterior of the Cathedral. I
+      went a walk, after leaving the castle, for a further feast of the
+      Cathedral from the paths along the shelving banks of the beautiful Weare.
+      There, at a certain point, I met a studious-looking gentleman who I am
+      sure must have been a professor of Durham University hard by; and I asked
+      him, with due entreaty for pardon, &ldquo;What river was that.&rdquo; He
+      quelled the surprise he must have felt at my ignorance and answered
+      gently, &ldquo;The Weare.&rdquo; &ldquo;Ah, to be sure! The Weare,&rdquo;
+      I said, and thanked him, and longed for more talk with him, but felt
+      myself so unworthy that I had not the face to prompt him further. He
+      passed, and then I met a man much more of my own kind, if not probably so
+      little informed. That rich, chill gale was still tossing and buffeting the
+      tree tops, and he made occasion of this to say, &ldquo;This is a cold wynd
+      a-blowin&rsquo;, Mister.&rdquo; &ldquo;It is, rather,&rdquo; I assented.
+      &ldquo;I was think-in&rsquo;,&rdquo; he observed from an apparent
+      generalization, &ldquo;that I wished I was at home.&rdquo; Then he
+      suddenly added, &ldquo;Help a poor man!&rdquo; I was not wholly surprised
+      at the climax, and I offered him, provisionally, a penny. &ldquo;Will that
+      do?&rdquo; He hesitated perceptibly; then he allowed, with a subtle
+      reluctance, &ldquo;Yes, that&rsquo;ll do,&rdquo; and so passed on to
+      satisfy, I hope, the wish he thought he had.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0140}.jpg" alt="{0140}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0140}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      I pursued my own course, as far as the bridge which spans the Weare near a
+      most picturesque mill, and then I stopped a kindly-looking workman and
+      asked him whether he thought I could find a fly or cab anywhere near that
+      would take me into the town. He answered, briefly but consistently with
+      his looks, &ldquo;Ah doot,&rdquo; and as he owned that it was a long way
+      to town, I let his doubt decide me to go back to the station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I felt that I ought to have driven from there into the town, and seen it,
+      and taken to York a later train than the one I had in mind. In the
+      depravity induced by my neglect of this plain duty, I went, with my third
+      class return ticket conscious in my pocket, into the first class
+      refreshment room, and had tea there, as if I had been gentry at the very
+      least, and possibly nobility. Then, having a good deal of time still on my
+      hands, I loitered over the book-stall of the station, and stole a passage
+      of conversation with a kindly clergyman whom I found looking at the pretty
+      shilling editions filling the cases. I said, How nice it was to have
+      Hazlitt in that green cloth; and he said, Yes, but he held for Gibbon in
+      leather; and just then his train came in and he ran off to it, and left me
+      to my guilt in not having gone to see Durham. It was now twilight, and too
+      late; but there the charming old town still is, and will long remain, I
+      hope, with its many memories of war and peace, for whoever will visit it.
+      Certainly there had been no lack of adventures in my ample hour. It was as
+      charming to weave my conjectures, about the two gentlemen with whom I had
+      so barely spoken, as to have carried my acquaintance with them further,
+      and I cannot see how it would have profited me to know more even of that
+      fellow-man who, in the cold wynd a-blowing, had just been thinking he
+      wished he was at home.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0007" id="link2H_4_0007"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It was fit that on our way to Boston we should pause in passing through
+      Cambridge. That was quite as we should have done at home, and I can only
+      wish now that we had paused longer, though every moment that kept us from
+      Boston, if it had been anywhere but in England, would have been a loss.
+      There, it was all gain, and all joy, the gay September 24th that we went
+      this divine journey. My companion was that companionable archaeologist who
+      had guided my steps in search of the American origins in London, and who
+      was now to help me follow the Pilgrim Fathers over the ground where they
+      sojourned when they were only the Pilgrim Sons. At divers places on the
+      way, after we left London, he pointed out some scene associated with
+      American saints or heroes. We traversed the region that George William
+      Curtis&rsquo; people came from, hard by Roxburgh, and Eliot&rsquo;s, the
+      Apostle to the Indians; again we skirted the Ralph Waldo Emerson country,
+      with its big market town of Bishop&rsquo;s Stortford; and beyond Ely,
+      where we stopped for the Cathedral and a luncheon, not unworthy of it, at
+      the station, he startled me from a pleasant drowse I had fallen into in
+      our railway carriage, with the cry: &ldquo;There! That is where Captain
+      John Smith was born.&rdquo; &ldquo;Where? Where?&rdquo; I implored too
+      late, looking round the compartment everywhere. &ldquo;Back where those
+      chickens were.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      That was the nearest I came to seeing one of the most famous Virginian
+      origins. But you cannot see everything in England; there are too many
+      things; and if the truth must be known I cared more for the natural
+      features than the historical facts of the landscape. The country was flat,
+      and a raw green, as it should be in that raw air, under that dun sky, with
+      sheep hardily biting the short tough pasturage under the imbrowning oaks
+      and elms, and the olive-graying willows, beside the full, still streams
+      scarce wetter than the ground they dreamed through.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We did not reach Boston until six o&rsquo;clock, when the day was already
+      waning, and the Stump of St. Botolph&rsquo;s Church stood dim against the
+      sky. It was a long drive through the suburban streets from the station to
+      the hotel, which we found full, and which with its crazy floors touched
+      the fancy as full of something besides guests. But it was well for us so,
+      because across the market-place, which forms the chief public square of
+      Boston, was a far better hotel, where we were welcomed to the
+      old-fashioned ideal of the English inn, such as I did not so nearly
+      realize anywhere else. The ideal was a little impaired by the electric
+      light in our bedrooms, but it was not a very brilliant electric light, and
+      there was a damp cold in the corridors which allowed no doubt of its
+      genuineness. In the dining-room, which was also the reading-room, there
+      was an admirable image of a fire in the grate, and a prevailing warmth and
+      brightness which cheered the heart of exile. When we presently had dinner,
+      specialized for us by certain differences from that of two other
+      travellers, there seemed nothing more to ask, except the conversation of
+      our companions, and this we duly had, quite as if we were four wayfarers
+      met there in a book. One of these gentlemen proved a solicitor from Bath,
+      and that made me feel more at home, knowing and loving Bath as I did. It
+      did not matter that in trying for some mutual acquaintance there we
+      failed; our good-will was everything; and the solicitor was intelligent
+      and agreeable. The other gentleman, tall, dark, of urbane stateliness, was
+      something more, in the touch of Oriental suavity which, more than his
+      nose, betrayed him; and it appeared, in delightful suggestion of the
+      old-time commercial intimacy of the Dutch and English coasts, that he was
+      from Holland, and next morning at breakfast he developed a large valise,
+      which I now think held samples. If he was a Dutch Jew, he was probably a
+      Spanish Jew by descent, and what will the difficult reader have more, in
+      the materials for his romance? Did we gather about the grate after we had
+      done dinner, and each tell the story of his life, or at least the most
+      remarkable thing that had ever happened to him?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0148}.jpg" alt="{0148}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0148}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      I cannot say, but I remember that my friend and I, in my instant hunger
+      for Boston, which was greater than my hunger for dinner, set forth while
+      the meal was preparing, and visited the Church of St. Botolph. To reach it
+      we had to pass through the greater length of the market-place, one of the
+      most picturesque in England, and the worthy ancestress of Faneuil Hall and
+      Quincy market-places, which are the most picturesque in America. At one
+      side of its triangle is the birthplace and dwelling of Jean Ingelow, and
+      at the point nearest the church is the statue of Herbert Ingram, the less
+      famous but more locally recognized Bostonian, who founded the <i>Illustrated
+      London News</i> with the money he made by the invention and sale of Old
+      Parr&rsquo;s Pills. He was thrice sent to Parliament from his native town,
+      and he related it to America, after two centuries, by drowning in Lake
+      Michigan. &ldquo;R. N.,&rdquo; the otherwise anonymous author of a very
+      intelligent and agreeable <i>Handbook of Boston</i>, relates that in his
+      first canvass for Parliament Ingram was opposed by a gentleman who, when
+      he asked the voices of the voters, after the old English fashion, was told
+      by four of them in succession that they were promised &ldquo;to their
+      cousin Ingram,&rdquo; and who thereupon declared that if he had known
+      Ingram &ldquo;was cousin to the whole town&rdquo; he would, never have
+      stood against him. Like the Bostonians of Massachusetts, the Bostonians of
+      Lincolnshire were in fact closely knit together by ties of kinship, owing,
+      &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo; believes, to the isolation of Boston before the
+      draining of its fens, and not to their conviction that there were no
+      outsiders worthy to mate with them.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The house where the martyrologist John Fox first saw the light was
+      replaced long ago by a famous old inn, pulled down in its turn; but the
+      many and many Americans who visit Boston may still visit the house where
+      Jean Ingelow was born. Whether they may see more than the outside of it I
+      do not know from experiment or even inquiry. &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo; will say
+      nothing of her but that she was born, and that her father was a banker;
+      perhaps he thinks that she has spoken sufficiently for herself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0152}.jpg" alt="{0152}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0152}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      The air of the market-place, as we crossed to the church, was of a
+      pleasant bleakness, and the Witham was coldly washing under the wall which
+      keeps St. Botolph from it. In the dimness we could have only a conjecture
+      of the church&rsquo;s outward beauty, and of the grandeur of the tower
+      climbing into the evening, where it has hailed so many myriads of moving
+      ships, and beckoned them to safety. But within, where it was already
+      night, the church was cheerfully luminous with Welsbach lights, which
+      showed it all wreathed and garlanded for a harvest festival, began the day
+      before, and to be concluded now with some fit religious observance. The
+      blossoms and leaves were a little wilted and withered, but the fruits and
+      vegetables were there in sturdy endurance, and together they swathed the
+      pulpit from which John Cotton used to preach, and all but hid its
+      structure from view, like flowers of rhetoric softening some hard
+      doctrine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Apparently, however, Cotton&rsquo;s doctrine was not anywise too hard, or
+      even hard enough, for such &ldquo;a factious people, who were imbued with
+      the Puritan spirit,&rdquo; as he found in Boston, when he was first
+      elected vicar of St. Botolph&rsquo;s; and it was not till Archbishop Laud&rsquo;s
+      ecclesiastical tyrannies began that he came to see &ldquo;the Sin of
+      Conformity&rdquo; and to preach resistance. His conflict with the
+      authorities went so far that exile to another Boston in another hemisphere
+      became his only hope. Or, as Lord Dorset intimated, &ldquo;if he had been
+      guilty of drunkenness, uncleanness, or any lesser fault, he could have
+      obtained his pardon, but as he was guilty of Puritanism, and
+      Non-conformity, the crime was non-pardonable; and therefore he advised him
+      to flee for his safety.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Cotton Chapel, so called, was restored mainly with moneys received
+      from Cotton&rsquo;s posterity, lineal or lateral, in his city of refuge
+      overseas, and &ldquo;the corbels that support the timbered ceiling are
+      carved with the arms of certain of the early colonists of New England.&rdquo;
+      Edward Everett, one of Cotton&rsquo;s descendants, wrote the dedicatory
+      inscription in Latin, which &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo; has Englished in verse,
+      and I am the more scrupulous to quote it, because, as I must own with my
+      usual reluctant honesty, I quite missed seeing the Cotton Chapel.
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     That here John Cotton&rsquo;s memory may survive
+     Where for so long he labored when alive,
+     In James&rsquo; reign and Charles&rsquo;, ere it ceased&mdash;
+     A grave, skilled, learned, earnest parish-priest;
+     Till from the strife that tossed the Church of God
+     He in a new world sought a new abode,
+     To a new England, a new Boston came,
+     (That took, to honor him, that reverend name)
+     Fed the first flock of Christ that gathered there&mdash;
+     Till death deprived it of its shepherd&rsquo;s care&mdash;
+     There well resolved all doubts of mind perplext,
+     Whether with cares of this world or the next;
+     Two centuries five lustra from the year
+     That saw the exile leave his labors here,
+     His family, his townsmen, with delight&mdash;
+     (Whom to the task their English kin invite)&mdash;
+     To the fair fane he served so well of yore,
+     His name, in two worlds honored, thus restore,
+     This chapel renovate, this tablet place,
+     In this, the year of man&rsquo;s recovered Grace,
+                         1855.
+</pre>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I missed most of the other memorable things in the church that night, but
+      I saw fleetingly some of the beautiful tombs for which it is famous; the
+      effigies of the dead lay in their niches, quietly, as if already tucked
+      away for the night, in the secular sleep of the dust beneath. The tombs
+      were more famous than they, and more beautiful, if the faces of some were
+      true likenesses, but after so many centuries one ought not to require even
+      women to be pretty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0156}.jpg" alt="{0156}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0156}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      We had not begun to have enough of Boston yet, and after dinner we went a
+      long walk up the Witham, away from the parapet before the church, under
+      which its deep tides are always washing to and fro. In the dimness, after
+      we had got a little to the outskirts of the town, there seemed shipyards
+      along the river&rsquo;s course, but at one place there was a large
+      building brilliantly lighted, which from certain effects at the windows we
+      decided to be a printing-office on the scale of those in and near our own
+      Boston. What was our shame and grief the next morning to find it was a
+      cigar factory, and to learn that cigar and cigarette making was almost the
+      chief industry of the mother Boston. There are really two large tobacco
+      factories there running overtime, and always advertising for more women
+      and girls to do their work; and in our Boston, not so long ago, smoking in
+      the street was forbidden! Such are the ironies of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What the shipyards had turned into by daylight, I do not now remember. The
+      Witham had turned into a long, deep gash, cut down into the clay twenty
+      feet from the level of the flood tides. We crossed on a penny ferry which
+      the current pushed over in the manner of the earliest ferries, near the
+      tobacco factory, and came back into the heart of the town through streets
+      of low stone houses, with few buildings of note to dignify their course.
+      Small craft lay along the steep muddy shores, and at one place a little
+      excursion steamer was waiting for the tide to come in and float it for the
+      fulfilment of its promise of sailing at ten o&rsquo;clock. We idly longed
+      to make its voyage with it, and if the chance were offering now, I
+      certainly should not forego it as I did then. But when you are in a
+      foreign place, no matter how much you have travelled and how well you know
+      that it will not offer soon again, you reject the most smiling chance
+      because you think you can take it any time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The morning was soft and warm, with a sun shining amiably on the rather
+      commonplace old town. I had risen betimes that I might go and get a
+      Spanish melon for my breakfast, but at eight o&rsquo;clock I found the
+      fruiterer&rsquo;s locked and barred against me. I lingered and hungered
+      for the melons which I saw in his window, and then I tried other
+      fruiterers, but none of them was stirring yet. I reflected how different
+      it would have been in our own Boston; and if it had not been for the
+      market people coming into the square and beginning to dress their stalls
+      with vegetables, and fish, and native fruits, such as hard pears and
+      knotty apples, I do not know how ill I might have come away thinking of
+      that idle mother Boston. In other squares there were cattle for sale
+      later, and fish, but I cannot in even my present leniency claim that the
+      markets were open at the hour which the genteeler commerce of the place
+      found so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping with
+      the general shambling and shapeless character of the town, which, once for
+      all, I must own was not an impressive place.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The best thing in it, and the thing you are always coming back to, is the
+      beautiful church, to which we paid a second visit early in the forenoon.
+      We found it where we left it the night before, lifting its tower from the
+      brink of the Witham, and looking far out over the flat land to a sea no
+      flatter. The land seems indeed, like so much English coast, merely the sea
+      come ashore, and turned into fens for the greater convenience of the
+      fishermen, whom, with the deeper sea sailors, we saw about the town,
+      lounging through the crooked streets, and hanging bare-armed upon the
+      parapets of the bridges. Now we found the church had about its foot a
+      population of Bostonians for whom, under their flat gravestones, it had
+      been chiming the quarters from its mellow-throated bells, while the
+      Bostonians on our side had been hustling for liberty, and money, and
+      culture, and all the good things of this world, and getting them in a
+      measure that would astonish their namesakes. Within the church we saw
+      again the beautiful tombs of the night before, and others like them, and
+      again we saw the pulpit of John Cotton, which we could make out a little
+      better than at first, because its garlands were a little more withered and
+      shrunken away. But better than either we realized the perfection of the
+      church interior as a whole, so ample, so simple, such a comfortable and
+      just sufficient eyeful.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      From other interests in St. Botolph&rsquo;s you somehow keep always, or
+      finally, coming to the Stump, as the tower is called somewhat in the humor
+      of our Boston. It is not so fair within as without; that could not be in
+      the nature of things; and yet the interior of the tower has a claim upon
+      the spectator&rsquo;s wonder, if not his admiration, which, so far as I
+      know, the interior of no other tower has. It is all treated as a loftier
+      room of the church, and its ceiling, a hundred and fifty feet from the
+      ground, is elaborately and allegorically groined. The work was done when
+      the whole church was restored about half a century ago, and has not the
+      claim of medieval whim upon the fancy. Not so much pleasure as he might
+      wish mingles with the marvel of the beholder, who carries a crick in the
+      neck away from the sight, and yet once, but not more, in a way, it is
+      worth while to have had the sight. Certainly this treatment of the tower
+      is unique; there is nothing to compare with it in Boston, Massachusetts,
+      and cannot be even when the interior of the Old South is groined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we came out of the church, we found the weather amusing itself as
+      usual in England, raining with wind, then blowing without rain, and
+      presently, but by no means decisively, sunning without either wind or
+      rain. The conditions were favorable to a further exploration of the town,
+      which seemed to have a passion for old cannon, and for sticking them about
+      in all sorts of odd nooks and corners. We found one smaller piece over a
+      gateway, which we were forbidden by a sign-board to enter on pain of
+      prosecution for trespassing. There was nothing else to prevent our
+      entering, and we went in, to find ourselves in an alley with nothing but a
+      Gypsy van in it. Nothing but a Gypsy van! As if that were not the
+      potentiality of all manner of wild romance! Whether the alley belonged to
+      Gypsies, or the Gypsies had trespassed by leaving their van in it, I shall
+      now probably never know, but I commend the inquiry to any reader of mine
+      whom these pages shall inspire to repeat our pilgrimage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0162}.jpg" alt="{0162}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0162}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      There was no great token of genteel life in Boston, so far as we saw it,
+      but perhaps we did not look in the right places. There were good shops,
+      but not fine or large ones, and I am able to report of the intellectual
+      status that there are three weekly newspapers, but no dailies, which could
+      not be the case in any American town of fourteen thousand people.
+      Concerning society, I can only say that in our wanderings we came at one
+      point on a vast, high-walled, iron-gated garden, which looked as if it
+      might have society beyond it, but not being positively forbidden we did
+      not penetrate it. We did indeed visit the ancient grammar-school, one of
+      those foundations which in England were meant originally for the poor
+      deserving of scholarship, but which have nearly all lapsed to the more
+      deserving rich, careful of the contamination of the lower classes. Being
+      out of term the school was closed to its pupils, but we found a contractor
+      there removing the old stoves and putting in a system of hot-water
+      heating, which he said was better fitted to resist the cold of the Boston
+      winters. He was not a very conversable man, but so much we screwed out of
+      him, with the added fact that the tuition of that school was no longer
+      free. It came to some five guineas a year, no great sum, but perhaps
+      sufficient to keep the school, with the other influences, select enough
+      for the patronage to which it had fallen. It was a pleasant place, with a
+      playground before it, which in the course of generations there must have
+      been a good deal of schoolboy fun got out of.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There remained for us now only the Guildhall to visit, and we had left
+      that to the last because it was the thing that had mostly brought us to
+      Boston. It was the scene of the trial and imprisonment of those poor
+      people of the region roundabout who were trying to escape from their
+      &ldquo;dread lord,&rdquo; James the First, and were arrested for this
+      crime, and brought to answer for it before the magistrates of the town.
+      Their dread lord had then lately met some ministers of their faith at
+      Hampton Court, and there browbeaten, if not beaten, them in argument, so
+      that he was in no humor to let, these people, who afterward became the
+      Pilgrim Fathers, get away to Holland, where there was no dread lord, or at
+      least none of King James&rsquo; thinking.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But no words can be so good to tell of all this as the words of Governor
+      Bradford in his <i>Historie of Plymouth Plantation</i>, where he says that
+      &ldquo;ther was a large companie of them purposed to get passage at Boston
+      in Lincolnshire, and for that end had hired a shipe wholy to them selves,
+      &amp; made agreement with the maister to be ready at a certaine day, and
+      take them and their goods in, at a conveniente place, wher they
+      accordingly would all attende in readiness. So after long waiting, &amp;
+      large expences, though he kepte not day with them, yet he came at length
+      &amp; tooke them in, in the night. But when he had them &amp; their goods
+      abord, he betrayed them, haveing before hand complotted with the serchers
+      &amp; other officers so to doe; who tooke them, and put them into open
+      boats, &amp; ther rifled and ransaked them, searching them to their shirts
+      for money, yea even the women furder then became modestie; and then caried
+      them back into the towne, &amp; made them a spectakle &amp; wonder to the
+      multitude, which came flocking on all sides to behould them. Being thus
+      first, by the catchpoule officer, rifled, &amp; stripte of their money,
+      books, and much other goods, they were presented to the magistrates, and
+      messengers sente to informe the lords of the Counsell of them; and so they
+      were comited to ward. Indeed the magistrats used them courteously, and
+      shewed them what favour they could; but could not deliver them till order
+      came from the Counsell-table. But the issue was that after a months
+      imprisonmente, the greatest parte were dismiste, &amp; sent to the places
+      from whence they came; but 7. of the principall were still kept in prison,
+      and bound over to the Assises.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My excellent &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo; of the <i>Handbook of Boston</i> is
+      anxious to have his reader, as I in turn am anxious to have mine,
+      distinguish between these future Pilgrim Fathers and the gentlemen and
+      scholars who later founded Boston in Massachusetts Bay, and called its
+      name after that of the town they had dwelt in or often visited before they
+      left the handsome keeping of the gentler life of Lincolnshire. Such were
+      Richard Bellingham, Edmund Quincy, Thomas Leverett, John Cotton, Samuel
+      Whiting, and others, known to our colonial and national history. Not even
+      Bradford or Brewster, afterward dignified figures in Plymouth colony, were
+      of the humble band, men, women, and children, that the officers of Boston
+      took from their vessel. &ldquo;Pathetic but splendid figures,&rdquo; my
+      brave &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo; calls them, and he tells how, after a month&rsquo;s
+      jail, they were &ldquo;sent home broken men, to endure the scoffs of their
+      neighbors and the rigors of ecclesiastical discipline.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The dungeons which remain to witness of their hardships in Boston are of
+      thick-walled, iron-grated stone, and the captives were fed on bread and
+      water within smell of the roasting and broiling of the Guildhall kitchens
+      immediately beside them. I will not conjecture with &ldquo;R. N.&rdquo;
+      that they were put there &ldquo;by a refinement of cruelty,&rdquo; so that
+      they might suffer the more in that vicinage. &ldquo;The magistrates&rdquo;
+      who had &ldquo;used them courteously and shewed them what favour they
+      could,&rdquo; would not have willed that; but perhaps &ldquo;the
+      Counsell-table&rdquo; did; and it was certainly a hardship that the
+      dungeons and the kitchens were so close together, as any man may see at
+      this day. Neither the dungeons nor the kitchens are any longer used; the
+      spits and grates are rusted where the fires blazed, and the cells where
+      the Pilgrims suffered are now full of large earthen jars. For no other or
+      better reason, the large open spaces of the basement outside of them were
+      scattered about with agricultural implements, ploughs, harrows, and the
+      like. It was the belief of my companion, founded on I know not what fact,
+      that the hall in which the Pilgrims were tried was a large upper chamber
+      which we found occupied by a boys&rsquo; school. The door stood partly
+      ajar, and we could see the master within walking up and down before some
+      twenty boys, as if waiting for one of them to answer some question he had
+      put them. Perhaps it was a question of local history, for none of them
+      seemed able to answer it; presently when a boy came out on some errand,
+      and we stopped him, and asked him where it was the Pilgrims had been
+      tried, he did not know, and apparently he had never heard of the Pilgrims.
+      He was a very nice-looking boy, and otherwise not unintelligent; certainly
+      he was well-mannered, as nice-looking English boys are apt to be with
+      their elders; perhaps he had heard too much of the Pilgrims, and had
+      purposely forgotten them. This might very well have happened in a place
+      like Boston where such hordes of Americans are coming every year, and
+      asking so many hard questions concerning an incident of local history not
+      wholly creditable to the place. He could justly have said that the same or
+      worse might have happened to the Pilgrims anywhere else in England, under
+      the dread lord there then was, and in fact something of the same hardship
+      did befall them afterward at the place a little northeast of Boston, which
+      we were now to visit for their piteous sake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The nexte spring after,&rdquo; as Bradford continues the narrative
+      of their sorrows, &ldquo;ther was another attempte made by some of these
+      &amp; others, to get over at an other place. And so it fell out, that they
+      light of a Dutchman at Hull, having a ship of his owne belonging to
+      Zealand; they made agreements with him, and acquainted him with their
+      condition, hoping to find more faithfullnes in him, then in the former of
+      their owne nation. He bad them not fear, for he would doe well enough. He
+      was by appointment to take them in betweene Grimsbe &amp; Hull, where was
+      a large comone a good way distante from any towne. Now against the
+      prefixed time, the women &amp; children, with the goods, were sent to the
+      place in a small barke, which they had hired for that end; and the men
+      were to meete them by land. But it so fell out, that they were ther a day
+      before the shipe came, and the sea being rough, and the women very sicke,
+      prevailed with the seamen to put into a creeke hardby, wher they lay on
+      ground at lowwater. The nexte morning the shipe came, but they were fast,
+      &amp; could not stir till about noone. In the mean time, the shipe
+      maister, perceiveing how the matter was, sente his boate to be getting the
+      men abord whom he saw ready, walking aboute the shore. But after the first
+      boat full was gott abord, &amp; she was ready to goe for more, the Mr.
+      espied a greate company, both horse &amp; foote, with bills, &amp; gunes,
+      &amp; other weapons; for the countrie was raised to take them. The
+      Dutchman seeing this swore his countries oath, &lsquo;sacremente,&rsquo;
+      and having the wind faire, waiged his Ancor, hoysed sayles, &amp; away.
+      But the poore men which were gott abord, were in great distress for their
+      wives and children, which they saw thus to be taken, and were left
+      destitute of their helps; and them selves also, not having a cloath to
+      shifte them with, more then they had on their baks, &amp; some scarce a
+      peney aboute them, all they had being abord the barke. It drew tears from
+      their eyes, and any thing they had they would have given to have been a
+      shore againe; but all in vaine, ther was no remedy, they must thus sadly
+      part. The rest of the men there were in greatest danger, made shift to
+      escape away before the troope could surprise them: those only staying that
+      best might, to be assistante unto the women. But pitifull it was to see
+      the heavie case of these poore women in this distress: what weeping &amp;
+      crying on every side, some for their husbands, that were carried away in
+      the ship as is before related; others not knowing what should become of
+      them, &amp; their little ones; others again melted in teares, seeing their
+      poore little ones hanging aboute them, crying for feare, and quaking with
+      could. Being thus aprehanded, they hurried from one place to another, and
+      from one justice to another, till in the ende they knew not what to doe
+      with them; for to imprison so many women &amp; innocent children for no
+      other cause (many of them) but that they must goo with their husbands,
+      seemed to be unreasonable and all would crie out of them; and to send them
+      home againe was as difficult, for they aleged, as the trueth was, they had
+      no homes to goe to, for they had either sould, or otherwise disposed of
+      their houses &amp; livings. To be shorte, after they had been thus
+      turmoyled a good while, and conveyed from one constable to another, they
+      were glad to be ridd of them in the end upon any termes: for all were
+      wearied &amp; tired with them. Though in the mean time they (poore soules)
+      indured miserie enough; and thus in the end necessitie forste a way for
+      them.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      If there is any more touching incident in the history of man&rsquo;s
+      inhumanity to man, I do not know it, or cannot now recall it; and it was
+      to visit the scene of it near &ldquo;Grimsbe,&rdquo; or Great Grimsby, as
+      it is now called, that we set out, after viewing their prison in Boston,
+      over wide plains, with flights of windmills alighted on them everywhere.
+      Here and there one seemed to have had its wings clipped, and we were told
+      by a brighter young fellow than we often had for a travelling companion
+      that this was because steam had been put into it as a motive power more
+      constant than wind, even on that wind-swept coast. There seems to have
+      been nothing else, so far as my note-book witnesses, to take up our
+      thoughts in the short run to Great Grimsby, and for all I know now I may
+      have drowsed by many chicken-yards marking the birthplace of our
+      discoverers and founders. We got to Great Grimsby in time for a very
+      lamentable lunch in a hostelry near the station, kept, I think, for such
+      &ldquo;poore people&rdquo; as the Pilgrims were, with stomachs not easily
+      turned by smeary marble table-tops with a smeary maid having to take their
+      orders, and her ineffective napkin in her hand. The honesty as well as the
+      poverty of the place was attested, when, returning to recover a forgotten
+      umbrella, we were met at the door by this good girl, who had left her bar
+      to fetch it in anticipation of all question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At Great Grimsby, it seemed, there was no vehicle but a very exceptional
+      kind of cab,&mdash;looking like a herdic turned wrongside fore, and unable
+      to orient itself aright,&mdash;available for the long drive to that
+      &ldquo;large comone a good way distante from any towne,&rdquo; which we
+      were to make, if we wished to visit the scene of the Pilgrims&rsquo;
+      sufferings in their second attempt to escape from their dread lord. In
+      this strange equipage, therefore, we set out, and nine long miles we drove
+      through a country which seemed to rise with increasing surprise at us and
+      our turnout on each inquiry we made for the way from chance passers. Just
+      beyond the suburbs of the town we entered the region of a vast, evil smell
+      which we verified as that of the decaying fish spread upon the fields, for
+      a fertilizer after they had missed their market in that great fishing
+      centre. Otherwise the landscape was much the ordinary English landscape of
+      the flatter parts, but wilder and rougher than in the south or west, and
+      constantly growing more so as we drove on and on. Our cabman kept a good
+      courage, as long as the highway showed signs of much travel, but when it
+      began to falter away into a country road, he must have lost faith in our
+      sanity, though he kept an effect of the conventional respect for his
+      nominal betters which English cabmen never part with except in a dispute
+      about fares and distances. We stayed him as well as we could with some
+      grapes and pears, which we found we did not want after our lunch, and
+      which we handed him up through his little trap-door, but a plaintive
+      quaver grew into his voice, and he let his horse lag in the misgiving
+      which it probably shared with him. Nothing of signal interest occurred in
+      our progress except at one point, near a Methodist chapel, where we caught
+      sight of a gayly painted blue van, lettered over with many texts and
+      mottoes, which my friend explained as one of the vans intinerantly used by
+      extreme Protestants of the Anne Askew persuasion to prevent the spread of
+      Romanism in England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The signs of travel had not only ceased, but a little in front of us the
+      way was barred by a gate, and beyond this gate there was nothing but a
+      sort of savage pasture, with many red and brown cattle in it, gathered
+      questioningly about the barrier, or lifting their heads indifferently from
+      the grass. Just before we reached the gate we passed a peasant&rsquo;s
+      cottage, where he was sociably getting in his winter&rsquo;s coal, and he
+      and his wife and children, and the carter, all leaned upon whatever
+      supports they found next them, and stared at the extraordinary apparition
+      of two, I hope, personable strangers driving in a hansom of extreme type
+      into a cow pasture. But we were not going to give ourselves away to their
+      too probable ignorance by asking if that were the place where the Pilgrims
+      who founded New England were first stopped from going to Holland.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      My friend dismounted, and opened the gate, and we drove in among the
+      cattle, and after they had satisfied a peaceful curiosity concerning us,
+      they went about their business of eating grass, and we strayed over
+      &ldquo;the large comone,&rdquo; and tried to imagine its looks nearly
+      three hundred years before. They could not have been very different; the
+      place could hardly have been much wilder, and there was the &ldquo;creeke
+      hardby wher they lay,&rdquo; the hapless women and children, in their boat
+      &ldquo;at lowwater,&rdquo; while the evening came on, no doubt, just as it
+      was doing with us, the weather clearing, and the sunset glassy and cold.
+      Off yonder, away across the solitary moor, was the course of the Humber,
+      marked for us by the trail of a steamer&rsquo;s smoke through the fringes
+      of trees, and for them by the sail of the Dutchman, who, when he saw next
+      day that &ldquo;great company, both horse and foote, with bills and gunes,
+      and other weapons,&rdquo; coming to harry those poor people, &ldquo;swore
+      his countries oath, &lsquo;sacremente,&rsquo; and having the wind faire,
+      waiged his ancor, hoysed sails, and away,&rdquo; leaving those desolate
+      women and their little ones lamenting.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      On our way back we stopped at a little country church, so peaceful, so
+      very peaceful, in the evening light, where it stood, withdrawn from the
+      highway, Norman and Gothic without, and within all so sweet and bare and
+      clean, that we could not believe in the old ecclesiasticism which
+      persecuted the Puritans into the exile whither they carried the
+      persecuting spirit with them. A pretty child, a little girl, opened the
+      churchyard gate and held it for us to pass, and her gentleness made me the
+      more question the history of those dreadful days in the past. When I saw a
+      young lady, in the modern dress which I had so often lost my heart to at
+      the Church Parade in Hyde Park, going up a leafy lane, toward the
+      vicarage, from having been for tennis and afternoon tea at some pleasant
+      home in the neighborhood, I denied the atrocious facts altogether. She had
+      such a very charming hat on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The suburbs of Great Grimsby, after you reach them through that zone of
+      bad smell, are rather attractive, and you get into long clean streets of
+      small stone houses, like those of Plymouth or Southampton, and presently
+      you reach the Humber, which is full of the steamers and sail, both fishing
+      and deep sea, of the prosperous port, with great booms of sawlogs from
+      Norway, half filling the channel, and with a fringe of tall chimneys from
+      the sawmills along the shores. Great Grimsby is not only the centre of a
+      vast distributing trade in coal and lumber, but of a still vaster trade in
+      fish. It cuts one&rsquo;s pride, if one has believed that Gloucester,
+      Massachusetts, is the greatest fishing port in the world, to learn that
+      Grimsby, with a hundred more fishing sail, is only &ldquo;<i>one</i> of
+      the principal fishing ports&rdquo; of the United Kingdom. What can one do
+      against those brutal British statistics? We think our towns grow like
+      weeds, but London seems to grow half such a weed as Chicago in a single
+      night.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0174}.jpg" alt="{0174}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0174}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      After we were got well into the town, we found ourselves part of an
+      immense bicycle parade, with bicyclers of both sexes on their wheels, in
+      masks and costumes, Pierrots, and Clowns, and Harlequins and Columbines,
+      in a competition for the prettiest and fanciest dress.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When we came to start from the station on our run to London, we reflected
+      that there were a great many of these bicyclers, and that they would
+      probably crowd us in our third-class compartment. So, as we had bought an
+      excellent supper in baskets, such as they send you on the trains
+      everywhere in England, and wished to eat it in quiet, we sought out the
+      guard who was lurking near for the purpose, and bribed him to shut us into
+      that compartment, and not let any one else in. There we remained in
+      darkness, with our curtains drawn, and when, near train-time, the
+      bicyclers began to swarm about the carriages, we heard them demanding
+      admittance to our compartment from our faithful guard, if that is the
+      right way to call him. He turned them away with soft answers, answers so
+      very soft that we could not make out what he said, but he seemed to be
+      inviting them into other compartments, which he doubtless pretended were
+      better. The murmurs would die away, and then rise again, and from time to
+      time we knew that a baffled bicycler was pulling at our door, or vainly
+      bumping against it. We listened with our hearts in our mouths; but no one
+      got in, and the train started, and we opened our baskets and began to eat
+      and to drink, like two aristocrats or plutocrats. What made our inhuman
+      behavior worse was that we were really nothing of the kind, but both
+      professed friends of the common people. The story might show that when it
+      comes to a question of selfishness men are all alike ready to profit by
+      the unjust conditions. However, it must be remembered that those people
+      were only bicyclers. If we could have conceived of them as masses we
+      should have known them for brothers, and let them in, probably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0008" id="link2H_4_0008"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      It is only some six or seven hours by train from London to Aberystwyth,
+      but if you will look at the names on a map of the Cambrian railways, when
+      you begin the Welsh part of your journey, you will seem to be in a
+      stranger and farther country than that of Prester John. Pwllheli, Cerrig y
+      Drudion, Gwerful Goch, Festiniog, Bryn Eglwys, Llanidloes, Maertwro,
+      Carnedd Fibast, Clynog Fwr, Llan-y-Mawddwy Machynlleth, Duffws, are a few
+      out of the hundred names in the hills or along the valleys, giving the
+      near neighborhood of England an effect of more than mid-Asian remoteness.
+      The eye starts at their look; but if the jaw aches at the thought of
+      pronouncing them, it is our own wilful orthographical usage that is at
+      fault; the words, whose sound the letters faithfully render, are music,
+      and they largely record a Christian civilization which was centuries old
+      when the Saxons came to drive the Britons into the western mountains and
+      to call them strangers in the immemorial home of their race. The Britons
+      of the Roman conquest, who became the Welsh of the baffled Saxon invaders,
+      and are the Cymry of their own history and poetry, still stand five feet
+      four in their stockings, where they have stood from the dawn of time, an
+      inexpugnable host of dark little men, defying the Saeseneg in their
+      unintelligible, imperishable speech.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Of course, except in the loneliest and farthest places, they speak English
+      as well as Welsh; and they misplace their aspirates, which they lost under
+      the Normans as the Saxons did. But this did not happen to them by conquest
+      as it did to the Saxons; they were beguiled of their h&rsquo;s when they
+      were cheated with a Welsh-born prince instead of the Welsh prince they
+      were promised in the succession of their ancient lines. They had been
+      devout Christians, after their manner, in the earliest centuries; as the
+      prefix Llan, or Saint, everywhere testifies, the country abounded in
+      saints, whose sons inherited their saintship; and at the Reformation they
+      became Calvinists as unqualifiedly as their kindred, the Bretons, remained
+      Catholics. They have characterized the English and Americans with their
+      strong traits in a measure which can be dimly traced in the spread of
+      their ten or twenty national names, and they have kept even with the most
+      modern ideals quite to the verge of co-education in their colleges. It is
+      a fact which no Welshman will deny that Cromwell was of Welsh blood.
+      Shakespeare was unquestionably of Welsh origin. Henry VII. was that Welsh
+      Twdwr (or Tudor, as the Saeseneg misspell it), who set aside the
+      Plantagenet succession, and was the grandsire of &ldquo;the great
+      Elizabeth,&rdquo; not to boast of Bloody Mary or Henry VIII. But if these
+      are not enough, there is the present Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mr.
+      Lloyd-George, who is now the chief figure of the English cabinet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The bad name which their own half-countryman, Giraldus Cambrensis, gave
+      the Welsh in the twelfth century, clings to them yet in the superstition
+      of all Norman-minded and Saxon-minded men, so that the Englishman I met on
+      the way from Edinburgh was doubtless speaking racially rather than
+      personally when he said that the Welsh were the prize liars of the
+      universe. I for my part heard no lies in Wales except those I told myself;
+      but as I am of Welsh stock, perhaps my experience is not wholly refutive
+      of that Englishman&rsquo;s position. I can only urge further the noted
+      philological fact that the Welsh language is so full of imagery that it is
+      almost impossible to express in it the brute veracities in which the
+      English speech is so apt. Otherwise I should say that nowhere have I been
+      used with a more immediate and constant sincerity than in Wales. The
+      people were polite and they were almost always amiable, but in English, at
+      least, they did not say the thing that was not; and their politeness was
+      without the servile forms from lower to higher which rather weary one in
+      England. They said &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; and &ldquo;No,&rdquo; but as gently
+      as if they had always added &ldquo;Sir.&rdquo; If I have it on my
+      conscience to except from my sweeping praise of sincerity the expressman
+      at Aberystwyth who promised that our baggage should be at our lodgings in
+      an hour, and did not bring it in five, I must add that we arrived on the
+      last day of a great agricultural fair, when even the New York Transfer
+      Company might have given a promise of more than wonted elasticity.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In the station of Aberystwyth there were about three or four thousand
+      Welshmen of the national height, volubly waiting for the trains to bear
+      them away to their farms and villages; but they made way most amiably for
+      the dismounting travellers, who in our case were led through them by the
+      most energetic porter I ever knew. They did not stare down upon us from
+      the unseemly altitude of other national statures, and often during our
+      stay I saw like crowds of civil men in the street markets who were no
+      taller, and sometimes there were women who had not scaled the heights
+      reached by our American girls. They would probably have competed fairly
+      well with these in the courses of the colleges to which the Welsh send
+      their daughters as well as their sons; but I will not pretend that the
+      good looks of either the men or women was of the American average. I
+      cannot even say that these contemporary ancient Britons had the advantage
+      of the toothless English peasantry in the prompt dentistry which is our
+      peculiar blessing. In Great Britain, though I must not say Ireland, for I
+      have never been there, a few staggering incisors seem a formidable
+      equipment of the jaw in lower-class middle life and even tender youth. The
+      difference is a tremendous advantage which, if it does not make for the
+      highest character in us, will doubtless stand us in good stead in any
+      close with the well-toothed Japanese, and when we are beaten, our
+      gold-fillings will go far to pay our indemnity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After all those thousands at the station had departed, there were still
+      visitors enough left in Aberystwyth to distend the hotels uncomfortably;
+      and the next morning we set out in the pursuit, always interesting and
+      alluring, of lodgings. The town seemed to be pretty full of lodgings, but
+      as it was the middle of August, and the very height of the season, they
+      were full-up in dismaying measure. We found the only one not kept by a
+      Welsh woman in the ostensible keeping of an Englishwoman, a veteran
+      cockney landlady, but behind her tottering throne reigned a Welsh girl,
+      under whose iron rule we fell as if we had been unworthy Saeseneg instead
+      of Cymric-fetched Americans. We had rejected other lodgings because,
+      though their keepers had promised to provision us, it always appeared that
+      we must go out and do the marketing ourselves. I shall lastingly regret
+      that we did not submit to this condition, for it would have been one of
+      the best means of studying the local life. But we held out for the London
+      custom, and before the Welsh Power, which has so often made itself felt
+      behind English thrones, could intervene, compliance was promised. After
+      that it remained for the Welsh Power to make our stay difficult, and our
+      going easy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0184}.jpg" alt="{0184}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0184}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      Otherwise the place was delightful; it was in almost the centre of the
+      long curve of the Victoria Terrace, with windows that looked down upon the
+      pebbly beach, and over the blue sea to the bluer stretch of the
+      Pembrokeshire hills on the south, and the Carnarvonshire hills on the
+      north, holding the lovely waters in their shadowy embrace. There was not
+      much shipping, and what there was seemed of the pleasure sort that parties
+      go down to the sea to be sick in. The long parade was filled at most hours
+      with the English who make the place their resort; whose bathing began
+      early in the morning and whose flirting continued far into the night, with
+      forenoon and afternoon dawdling and dozing on the pebbles. At one end of
+      the Terrace rose a prodigious headland, whose slope was scaled over with
+      broken slate, like some mammoth heaving from the deep and showing an
+      elephantine hide of bluish gray. At the other end was the Amusement Pier,
+      with the co-educational college, which is part of the University of Wales,
+      and with divers hotels. Somewhat behind and beyond were the ruins of one
+      of those castles which the Normans planted with a mailed fist at every
+      vantage in Wales, as their sole means of holding down the swarming,
+      squirming, fighting little dark people of the country. Even then they
+      could not do it, for the Welsh, often overrun, were never conquered, as
+      they will tell you themselves if you ask them. But Wales is now perhaps
+      the most peaceful country in the world. Its prisons for the most part
+      stand empty (it is said), and the people, once so turbulent, are as little
+      given to violence as to vice. In fact, I once heard a great Welsh scholar
+      declare that in the old times it was not the true Welsh who kept up the
+      fighting, either on the public or the private scale, but the Scotch and
+      Irish who had found a home among them. In any case, it is true that after
+      the Normans had planted their castles in Wales to hold the country, it was
+      all they could do to hold the castles, and not till their enemies had
+      imagined having the English King&rsquo;s son born in one of them did they
+      bring the Welsh under the English crown at last. Even then that uncertain
+      people broke from their allegiance now and again; or the Scotch and Irish
+      among them did.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      All sorts of sights and sounds might be expected on our Terrace, but that
+      which especially warmed the heart of exile in us, and pleased the fancy of
+      other sojourners was the appearance, one evening, of a stately band of
+      tall men in evening dress and top-hats, with musical instruments in their
+      grasp, and heads lifted high above their Welsh following. We called the
+      Power behind the Throne to the window in our question and she gave a glad
+      cry: &ldquo;Oh, they&rsquo;re the Neegurs! They&rsquo;re the white
+      Neegurs!&rdquo; and at sight of our compatriotic faces at the pane, these
+      beautiful giants took their stand before our house, and burst into the
+      familiar music of the log-cabin, the stern-wheel steamboat, and the
+      cornfield, as well as the ragtime melodies of later days. It was a rich
+      moment, and I know not which joyed in it more, the Welsh Power or the
+      American Sufferance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But here, before I go farther afield, I must note a main difference
+      between the Welsh Power and the English slavey to whom she corresponded in
+      calling and condition. She was so far educated as to know the pseudonym of
+      the friend who came to see us, and to have read his writings in the <i>Welsh
+      Gazette</i>, treating our proposed triumph in his distinction with the
+      fine scorn she used for all our airs. If she had been an old-fashioned
+      Yankee Help she could not have been more snubbing; but when we had been
+      taught to know our place she was more tolerant, and finally took leave of
+      us without rancor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The notion of the general Welsh education which her intelligence gave us
+      was carried indefinitely farther by the grocer&rsquo;s boy to whom our
+      friend presented me one evening, after he had been struggling to make me
+      understand what an <i>englyn</i> was. I am able now to explain that it is
+      a polite stanza which the Welsh send with a present of fruit or flowers,
+      or for a greeting upon any worthy occasion. It is rhymed, sometimes at
+      both ends of the lines, and sometimes in the middle of them, and it
+      presents all the difficulties of euphony which the indomitable Welsh glory
+      in overcoming. But when my friend took me in hand, my ignorance was of so
+      dense a surface that he could make no impression on it, and he said at
+      last, &ldquo;Let us go into this grocery. There&rsquo;s a boy here who
+      will <i>show</i> you what an englyn is,&rdquo; and after I was introduced
+      the kind youth did so with pleasure, while he sold candles to one
+      customer, soap to another, cheese to another, and herring to another. He
+      first wrote the englyn in Welsh, and when I had sufficiently admired it in
+      that tongue (for which no atavistic knowledge really served me), he said
+      he would put it into English, and he did so. It was then not rhymed at
+      both ends or in the middle, but it was rhymed quite enough, and if it had
+      not the harp-like sweetness of the original, it was still such a musical
+      stanza that I shall always be sorry to have lost it. What I can never lose
+      the impression of is the wide-spread literary lore of the common Welsh
+      people which the incident suggested. I could not fancy even a Boston
+      grocer&rsquo;s boy doing the like; and perhaps this was an uncommon boy in
+      Wales itself. He told me a good deal, which I have mainly forgotten, about
+      the state of polite learning in his country and in what honor the living
+      bards were held. It seems that in that rhyming and singing little land,
+      the poets are still known as of old by their bardic names. As Jones, or
+      Evans, or Edwards they have no fame beyond other men, but up and down all
+      Wales they are celebrated as this bard or that, and are honored according
+      to their poetic worth.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      After the appearance of the White Neegurs on the Terrace, I could hardly
+      have expected any livelier appeal to my American pride, and yet it came,
+      one day, when I learned that the line of carriages which I saw passing our
+      windows were the vehicles bearing to some public function the members of
+      the British Chautauqua. How far the name and idea of Chautauqua have since
+      spread there is no saying, but it was the last of our national inventions
+      which I should have expected to find in Aberystwyth, though Welsh culture
+      was reasonably in its line, and the Eisteddfod was not out of keeping with
+      the summer conferences held beside our lovely up-State lake. The British
+      Chautauqua, as I saw it, was a group of people from all parts of the
+      United Kingdom joined in the pursuit of improvement and enjoyment, and
+      they were now here on one of their summer outings. They had been invited
+      to a gentleman&rsquo;s place not far from Aberystwyth to view as
+      indubitable a remnant of the Holy Grail as now exists, and it was my very
+      good fortune through the kind offices of that friend of ours to be invited
+      with them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a blamelessly rainless afternoon, of a sort commoner on the western
+      Welsh coast than on other shores of the &ldquo;rainy isles,&rdquo; but not
+      too common even there; and we drove out of the town through the prettiest
+      country of hillside fields and valleys opening to the sea, on a road that
+      was fairly dusty in the hot sun. There were cottages, grouped and
+      detached, all the way, with gray stone walls and blue slate roofs, and in
+      places the children ran out from them with mercenary offerings of flowers
+      and song, or with frank pleas for charity direct. I yielded with
+      reluctance to the instruction of a Manchester economist in my carriage,
+      and denied them, when I would so much rather have abetted them in their
+      wicked attempts on our pockets. I remember ruefully still that they had
+      voices as sweet and eyes as dark as the children who used to chase our
+      wheels in Italy, and I have no doubt they deserved quite as well of us as
+      those did.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I got back my spirits when we left our carriages, and I found myself
+      walking up a pleasant avenue of wilding trees, with a young Chautauquan
+      from Australia who looked as if he might be a young Chautauquan from
+      Alabama, tall, and lean, and brown. We fell into talk about the trees, and
+      he said how they differed in their green from the sombre gray of his
+      native forests; and then he, from that vast far continent of his, spoke of
+      the little island where we were, as Home. That has always a strange effect
+      for us self-outcasts from the great British roof, and whether it makes us
+      smile, or makes us sigh, it never fails to startle us when we hear it from
+      colonial lips. The word holds in common kindness Canada and India and
+      South Africa and Australia, and it has its pathos in the fact that the old
+      mother of these mighty children seems to leave solely to them the
+      tenderness that draws them to her in that notion of home.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      There were about fifty of those British Chautauquans, and when they had
+      ranged themselves on the grass before the shrubbery of a pleasant lawn,
+      backed by a wooded slope, the dignified lady of the house came out with a
+      casket in her hand, and put it on a table, and the exercises began. Fitly,
+      if the casket really held the sacred relic, they began with prayer; then a
+      Welsh soloist followed with a hymn, but whether she sang in Welsh or
+      English, I do not remember; I am only sure she sang divinely; and then
+      came the speeches. The first of the speeches was by our friend, who was
+      the local Unitarian minister, and of a religious body not inconsiderable
+      in that Calvinistic Wales. He told us how the Holy Grail had been
+      deposited with the monks of Strata Florida, the famous old abbey near
+      Aberystwyth; but I forgot who made them this trust, unless it was King
+      Arthur&rsquo;s knights, and I am not sure whether the fact is matter of
+      legend or history. What I remember is that when the abbey was suppressed
+      by Henry VIII., certain of the escaping monks came with the relic to the
+      gentle house where we then were, and placed it in the keeping of the
+      family who have guarded it ever since.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0192}.jpg" alt="{0192}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0192}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      After our friend, the lady of this house took up the tale, and told in
+      words singularly choice and simple the story of the sacred relic as the
+      family knew it. I had only once before heard a woman speak, no less a
+      woman than our great and dear Julia Ward Howe, and it seemed to me that
+      she spoke better than any man; and I must say of the Chautauquans&rsquo;
+      hostess, that day, that if ever the Englishwomen come into their full
+      political rights, as they seem sure to do, the traditions of good sense
+      and good taste in English public speaking will not pass, but will prosper
+      on through their orators. There were touches of poetry, nationally Welsh,
+      in what she said, and touches of humor perhaps personally Welsh. It seems
+      that the cup had been famed throughout the countryside for the miraculous
+      property by which whoever drank from it was cured of his or her malady,
+      and it had been passed freely round to all sufferers ever since it came
+      into her family&rsquo;s keeping. That they might make doubly sure of the
+      miracle, it was the custom of the sick not only to empty the cup, but to
+      nibble a little bit of the wood, and swallow that, so that in whatever
+      state the monks of Strata Florida had confided it, the vessel was now in
+      the state we saw. Saying this the lady opened the casket holding it, and
+      showed us the crescent-shaped rim of a wooden bowl, about the bigness of a
+      cocoanut shell; all the rest had been consumed by the pious sufferers whom
+      it had restored to health.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I am sorry, after all, to own that this cup is said by some authorities
+      not to be the Holy Grail, but a vessel like it carved out of the true
+      cross. But even so subordinate a relic is priceless, and as it is no
+      longer possible to drink from it, we may hope that the fragment will
+      remain indefinitely to after time. When they had wondered at the sight of
+      it the Chautauquans and their friend were made free of the charming
+      seventeenth-century house, which would be old for this country, but which
+      in the taste of that time was rather modern, and looked like the casino of
+      some Italian villa. It abounded, as such houses in England do, in the
+      pictured faces of the past, and in the memorials which only the centuries
+      can leave behind them, but was too graceful to seem rich. &ldquo;A home of
+      ancient peace,&rdquo; it looked, in its mild gray stone amidst its lawns
+      and shrubberies, the larger hold of the gardens and pleasaunces through
+      which the Chautauquans followed from it.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      At Aberystwyth, and elsewhere in Wales, one of the things I noticed was
+      the difference of the people from the people over the English border in
+      their attitude toward their betters. They might stand only five feet in
+      their stockings, but they stood straight, and if they were respectful,
+      they were first self-respectful. In our run from Shrewsbury, their
+      language first made itself generally heard at Newport, and it increased in
+      the unutterable names of the stations westward, the farther we passed into
+      their beautiful country, but they had always English enough to be civil,
+      though never servile. The country is beautiful in the New England measure,
+      but it is of a softer and smaller beauty; it looks more caressable; it is
+      like Vermont rather than New Hampshire, and it is more like New England
+      than Old England in the greater number of isolated farm-houses, from which
+      the girls as well as the boys come to the university colleges for learning
+      undreamt of by English farm villagers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The air was fresh and sweet, and though it seemed to shower wherever we
+      stopped to let another train go by on a siding of our single track, there
+      was a very passable sense of summer sun. The human type as we began to
+      observe it and as we saw it afterward throughout the land was not only
+      diminutive, but rather plain and mostly dark, in the men; as to the women
+      they were, as they are everywhere, charming, with now and then a face of
+      extraordinary loveliness, and nearly always the exquisite West of England
+      complexion. In their manners the people could not be more amiable than the
+      English, who are as amiable as possible, but they seemed brighter and
+      gayer. This remained their effect to the last in Aberystwyth, and when one
+      left the Terrace where the English visitors superabounded, the Welsh had
+      the whole place to themselves. I would not push my conjecture, but it
+      seemed to me that there was an absence of the cloying loyalty which makes
+      sojourn in England afflictive to the republican spirit; I remember but one
+      shop dedicated to the King&rsquo;s Majesty, with the royal arms over the
+      door, though there may have been many others; I am always warning the
+      reader not to take me too literally.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Though I was about the streets by day and by dark, I saw no disorderly
+      behavior of any kind in the town away from the beach; I do not mean there
+      was any by the sea, unless some athletic courtship among the young people
+      of the watering-place element was to be accounted so. There was not much
+      fashion there, except in a few pretty women who recalled the church parade
+      of Hyde Park in their flowery and feathery costumes. Back in the town
+      there was no fashion at all, but a general decency and comfort of dress.
+      The Welsh costume survives almost solely in the picture-postal cards,
+      though perhaps in the hilly fastnesses the women still wear the
+      steeple-crowned hats which we associate with the notion of witches; when
+      they come to market in Aberystwyth they wear hard, shiny black straw hats
+      like the men&rsquo;s. Amongst the throng of Saturday-night shoppers I saw
+      none of the drunkenness that one sees so often in Scottish streets, and in
+      English cities, and, I grieve to say, even in some New England towns. In
+      the Welsh quarter Sunday was much more the Sabbath than it was on the
+      Terrace, where indeed it seemed a day of pleasure rather than praise.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      All the week I had the best intention of hearing the singing in some of
+      the Welsh churches, but my goodwill could not carry the day against the
+      fear of a sermon which I should not understand. A chance sermon would
+      probably have touched upon the education act which was then stirring all
+      Dissenting England and Wales to passive resistance, and from Lincolnshire
+      to Carnarvonshire was causing the distraint of tables and chairs, tools,
+      hams, clocks, clothing, poultry, and crops for the payment of such part of
+      the Dissenters&rsquo; taxes as would go to the support of the Church
+      schools. Possibly it might also have referred to the Walk Out of the Welsh
+      Members of Parliament; this was an incident which I heard mentioned as of
+      imperial importance, though what caused it or came of it I do not know.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Instead of going to church, I strolled up and down the Terrace and
+      observed the watering-place life. The town was evidently full, or at least
+      all the lodging-houses were, and as it is with the English everywhere in
+      their summer resorts, there were men enough to go round, so that no poor
+      dear need pine for a mate on that pleasant beach. Aberystwyth is therefore
+      to be commended to our overflow of girls, though whether there are many
+      eligible noblemen among those youth I have not the statistics for saying.
+      All the visitors may have been people of rank; I only know that I was told
+      they were mostly from the midland cities, and they seemed to be having the
+      good time which people of brief outings alone have. The bathing began, as
+      I have noted, very early in the day with the men in the briefest possible
+      tights; the women, for compensation, wore long trousers with their
+      bathing-skirts, and they enhanced the modesty of their effect by the
+      universal use of bathing-machines, pushed well away from the curious
+      shore. There was not much variety in the visiting English type, but there
+      was here and there a sharp imperial accent, as in the two pale little,
+      spindle-legged Anglo-Indian boys, with their Hindu ayah, very dark, with
+      sleek dark hair, and gleaming eyes in a head not much bigger than a black
+      walnut.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The crescent of the beach was a serried series of hotels and
+      lodging-houses, from tip to tip, but back of these were streets of
+      homelike, smallish dwellings, that broke rank farther away, and scattered
+      about in suburban villas, with trees and flowers and grass around them.
+      Beyond stretched, as well as it could stretch among its hills, the
+      charming country of fields, and woods, and orchards.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I suppose I did not quite do my duty by the ruins of the Norman castle,
+      and I feel that it is now too late to repair my neglect. The stronghold
+      was more than once attempted by the Welsh in those wars which make their
+      history a catalogue of battles, but it held out Norman till the Normans
+      turned English. Owen Glendover took it in 1402, when it was three hundred
+      years old, though not yet feeble with age, and in due time one of Cromwell&rsquo;s
+      lieutenants destroyed it. Some very picturesque fragments remain to attest
+      the grace and strength of the ancient hold. It is near the University
+      College and the Amusement Pier, so that the mere sight-seers can do all
+      the ordinary objects of interest at Aberystwyth in half a day or half an
+      hour. But we were none of these. We had fallen in love with the place, and
+      we would fain have stayed on after the week was up for which we had taken
+      our lodging. It appeared from a house-to-house canvass, that there was no
+      other lodging to be had in all that long crescent of the Terrace; or, if
+      this is incredible, there was none we would have. Our successors were
+      impending; and though I think our English landlady might have invented
+      something for us at the last moment, the Welsh Power was inexorable. Her
+      ideal was lodgers who would go out and buy their own provisions, and we
+      had set our faces against that. Some one must yield, and the Welsh Power
+      could not; it was not in her nature. We were therefore in a manner
+      expelled from Aberystwyth, but our banishment was not from all Wales, and
+      this was how we went next to Llandudno.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0009" id="link2H_4_0009"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Froissart&rsquo;s saying, if it was Froissart&rsquo;s, that the English
+      amuse themselves sadly antedates that notion of Merry England which is now
+      generally rejected by serious observers. I should myself prefer the
+      agnostic position, and say that I did not know whether the English were
+      glad or not when they looked gay. What I seem to be certain of, but I do
+      not say that I am certain, is that they look gayer in their places of
+      amusement than we do. I do not mean theatres, or parliaments, or
+      music-halls, or lecture-rooms, by places of amusement, but what we call
+      summer resorts a little more largely than those resorts which the English
+      call watering-places. Of these I should like to take as a type the
+      charming summer resort on the coast of North Wales which is called
+      Llandudno in print, and in speech several different ways.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The English simply and frankly, after their blunt nature, call the place
+      Landudno, but the Welsh call it, according to one superstition of their
+      double <i>l</i> and their French <i>u</i>, Thlandidno. According to
+      another, we cannot spell it in English at all; but it does not much
+      matter, for the last superstition is the ever-delightful but ever-doubtful
+      George Borrow&rsquo;s, who says that the Welsh <i>ll</i> is the same as
+      the Spanish <i>ll</i>, but who is probably mistaken, most other
+      authorities agreeing that if you pronounce it <i>lhl</i> you will come as
+      near it as any Saeseneg need. It is a constantly besetting question in
+      Wales, where the prefix <i>Llan</i> speckles the map all over, owing to
+      that multitude of Saints who peopled the country in the times when a Saint&rsquo;s
+      sons were every one saints, and none was of particularly holy, or even
+      good life, because he was known for a saint. Like a continental noble, he
+      inherited his title equally with all his brothers.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But through whatever orthoepic mazes you search it, Llandudno has every
+      claim on your regard and admiration. Like Aberystwyth, its sea front is a
+      shallow crescent, but vaster, with a larger town expanding back of it, and
+      with loftier and sublimer headlands, at either end, closing it in a more
+      symmetrical frame. But I should say that its sea was not so blue, or its
+      sky either, and its air was not so soft or dry. Morally it is more
+      constantly lively, with a greater and more insistent variety of
+      entertainments. For the American its appeal might well have begun with the
+      sight of his country&rsquo;s flag floating over a tennis-ground at the
+      neighboring watering-place and purer Welsh town of Rhyl. The approach to
+      his affections was confirmed by another American flag displayed before one
+      of the chief hotels in Llandudno itself. I learned afterward of the
+      landlord that this was because there were several Chicago families in his
+      house, and fifteen Americans in all; but why the tennis-ground of Rhyl
+      flew our national banner, I do not know to this day. It was indeed that
+      gentle moment when our innocent people believed themselves peculiarly dear
+      to the English, and might naturally suppose, if from Chicago, or Boston,
+      or Denver, that the English would wish to see as often as possible the
+      symbol of our successful revolt from the princes and principles to which
+      they have religiously adhered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0204}.jpg" alt="{0204}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0204}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      Both that home of the patriotic Chicago families, and the other best hotel
+      were too full for us, and after a round of the second-best we decided for
+      lodgings, hoping as usual that they would bring us nearer the native life.
+      The best we could get, facing the sea midway of the crescent, were not
+      exactly Welsh in their keeping. The landladies were, in fact, two elderly
+      Church-of-England sisters from Dublin, who had named their house out of a
+      novel they had read. They said they believed the name was Italian, and the
+      reader shall judge if it were so from its analogue of Osier Wood. The
+      maids in the house, however, were very truly and very wickedly Welsh: two
+      tough little ponies of girls, who tied their hair up with shoe-strings,
+      and were forbidden, when about their work, to talk Welsh together, lest
+      they should speak lezing of those Irish ladies. The rogues were half
+      English, but the gentle creature who served our table was wholly Welsh;
+      small, sweet-voiced, dark-eyed, intelligent, who suffered from the
+      universal rheumatism of the British Isles, but kept steadily to her duty,
+      and accepted her fate with patience and even cheerfulness. She waited on
+      several other tables, for the house was full of lodgers, all rather less
+      permanent than ourselves, who were there for a fortnight; we found our
+      landladies hoping, when we said we were going, to have had us with them
+      through the winter.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Our fellow-lodgers were quiet people of divers degrees, except perhaps the
+      highest, unless the nobility bring boiled hams with them when they visit
+      the seaside. The boiled ham of the drawing-room floor was frankly set out
+      on the hall table, where it seemed to last a week, or at least till the
+      lodgers went away. There was much coming and going, for it was the height
+      of the season, with the prices at flood tide. We paid six guineas a week
+      for three bedrooms and a sitting-room; but our landladies owned it was
+      dear. An infirm and superannuated sideboard served for a dressing-table in
+      one room; in others the heavier pieces of furniture stood sometimes on
+      four legs, sometimes on three. We had the advantage of two cats on the
+      back fence, and a dog in the back yard; but if the controversy between
+      them was carried on in Welsh, it is no wonder we never knew what it was
+      about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Our hostesses said the Welsh were dirty housekeepers: &ldquo;At least <i>we</i>
+      think so,&rdquo; but I am bound to say their own cooking was very good;
+      and not being Welsh our hostesses consented to market for us, except in
+      the article of Spanish melons: these I bought myself of increasing cost
+      and size. When I alleged, the second morning, that the melon then sold me
+      for sixpence had been sold me by another boy for fourpence the day before,
+      my actual Cymric youth said, &ldquo;Then he asked you too little,&rdquo;
+      which seemed a <i>non sequitur</i> but was really an unexpected stroke of
+      logic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the utmost severity used with me by my co-racials in Llandudno.
+      They were in the great majority of the permanent inhabitants, but they
+      were easily outnumbered among the pleasurers by the Saeseneg, whose
+      language prevailed, so that a chance word of Welsh now and then was all
+      that I heard in the streets. Some faint stirrings of ambition to follow
+      the language as far as a phrase-book would lead were not encouraged by the
+      kindly bookseller who took my money for it; and I did not go on. It is a
+      loss for me in literature which translation cannot supply, for the English
+      lovers of Welsh poetry, after praising it to the skies, are never able to
+      produce anything which is not direly mechanical and vacuous. The native
+      charm somehow escapes them; the grace beyond the reach of art remains with
+      the Cymric poets who have resources for its capture unknown to their
+      English admirers. George Borrow seems the worst failure in this sort, and
+      the worst offender in giving his reader the hopes he never fulfils, so
+      that his <i>Wild Wales</i> is a desert of blighted literary promises. I
+      believe that the merit of Welsh poetry dwells largely, perhaps
+      overlargely, in its intricate technique, and in the euphonic changes which
+      leave the spoken word ready for singing almost without the offices of the
+      composer.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      One of the great musical contests, the yearly national Eisteddfod, was
+      taking place that year at the neighboring town of Rhyl, but I did not go
+      to hear it, not being good for a week&rsquo;s music without intermission.
+      At Llandudno there was only the music of the Pierrots and the Niggers,
+      which those simple-hearted English have borrowed, the one from France and
+      the other from these States. Their passion for our colored minstrelsy is,
+      in fact, something pathetic. They like Pierrots well enough, and Pierrots
+      <i>are</i> amusing, there is no doubt of it; but they dote upon Niggers,
+      as they call them with a brutality unknown among us except to the
+      vulgarest white men and boys, and the negroes themselves in moments of
+      exasperation. Negro minstrelsy is almost extinct in the land of its birth,
+      but in the land of its adoption it flourishes in the vigor of undying
+      youth: no watering-place is genuine without it. Bands of Niggers haunt the
+      streets and suburbs of London, and apparently every high day or holiday
+      throughout the British Islands requires the stamp of their presence as a
+      nostrum requires the name of the patentee blown in the bottle. The decay
+      of their gay science began among us with the fall of slavery, and the
+      passing of the old plantation life; but as these never existed in Great
+      Britain the English version of negro minstrelsy is not affected by their
+      disappearance. It is like the English tradition of the Red Skins, which
+      has all but vanished from our superstition, but remains as powerful as
+      ever in the constant fancy of those islanders.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The English like their Niggers very, very black, and as their Niggers are
+      English they know how to gratify the national preference: such a spread of
+      scarlet lips over half the shining sable face is known nowhere else in
+      nature or art; and it must have been in despair of rivalling their
+      fellow-minstrels that the small American troupe we saw at Aberystwyth went
+      to the opposite extreme and frankly appeared as the White Neegurs. At
+      Llandudno the blackness of the Niggers was absolute, so that it almost
+      darkened the day as they passed our lodging, along the crescent of the
+      beach on their way to their open-air theatre beyond it. They were followed
+      by a joyous retinue of boys and girls, tradesmen&rsquo;s apprentices,
+      donkeys, bath-chairs, and all the movable gladness of the watering-place,
+      to the music of their banjos and the sound of their singing. They were
+      going to a fold of the foot-hills called the Happy Valley, bestowed on the
+      public for such pleasures by the local nobleman whose title is given to a
+      principal street, and to other points and places, I suppose out of the
+      public pride and gratitude. It is a charming amphitheatre overlooked by
+      the lofty tops around, and there on the green slope the Niggers had set up
+      their stage, and ranged the spectators&rsquo; chairs in the classification
+      of first, second, and third so dear to the British soul. There they
+      cracked their jokes, and there they sang their songs; the songs were newer
+      than the jokes, but they were both kinds delivered with a strong Cockney
+      accent, and without an aspirate in its place. But it was all richly
+      acceptable to the audience, who laughed and cheered and joined in the
+      chorus when asked. Here, as everywhere, the crowd delighted equally in
+      songs of the sloppiest sentimentality and of humor nighest indecency.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0210}.jpg" alt="{0210}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0210}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      On the afternoon of our visit the good lady next me could not contain her
+      peculiar pride in the entertainment, and confided that she knew the leader
+      of the troupe, who was an old friend of her husband&rsquo;s. It was indeed
+      a time and place that invited to expansion. Nothing could have been
+      friendlier and livelier than the spectacle of the spectators spread over
+      the grassy slope, or sublimer than the rise of the hills around, or more
+      enchanting than the summer sea, with the large and little shipping on it,
+      and the passenger-steamers going and coming from Liverpool and all the
+      points in the region round. The two headlands which mark the limits of the
+      beautiful beach, Great Orme&rsquo;s Head, and Little Orme&rsquo;s Head,
+      are both of a nobleness tempered to kindliness by the soft and manageable
+      beauty of their forms. I never got quite so far as Little Orme&rsquo;s
+      Head, for it was full two miles from our lodging, and a fortnight was not
+      long enough for the journey, but with Great Orme&rsquo;s Head I was on
+      terms of very tolerable intimacy. A road of the excellence peculiar to
+      England passes round on the chin, so to speak, and though I never went the
+      length of it, I went far enough to know the majesty of the seaward
+      prospect. From the crown of the Head there is a view of perhaps all the
+      mountains in Wales, which from this point appears entirely composed of
+      mountains, blue, blue and enchantingly fair. On the townward side you may
+      descend into the Happy Valley, as we did, and find always a joyous crowd
+      listening to the Niggers. If, after some doubt of your way, you have the
+      favor of a nice boy and an intelligent collie dog, whom the boy is helping
+      herd home the evening cows of a pleasant farm, you will have a charming
+      glimpse of the local civilization; and perhaps you will notice that the
+      cows do not pay much attention to the boy, but obey the dog implicitly; it
+      is their Old World convention.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      From another side we had ascended the mountain by the tram line which
+      climbs it to the top, and at every twist and turn lavishes some fresh
+      loveliness of landscape upon your vision. Near by, we noticed many
+      depressions and sinkages in the ground, and a conversable man in
+      well-oiled overalls who joined us at a power-house, said it was from the
+      giving way of the timbers in the disused copper-mines. Were they very old,
+      we asked, and he said they had not been worked for forty years; but this,
+      when you come to think of the abandoned Roman mines yet deeper in the
+      hill, was a thing of yesterday. The man in the oily overalls had evidently
+      not come to think of it, but he was otherwise a very intelligent mechanic,
+      and of a hospitable mind, like all the rest of our chance acquaintance in
+      Great Britain. I do not know that I like to think of those Roman mines
+      myself, where it is said the sea now surges back and forth: they must have
+      been worked by British slaves, who may be fancied climbing purblindly out
+      when the legions left Britain, and not joining very loudly in the general
+      lamentation at their withdrawal, but probably tempering the popular grief
+      with the reflection that the heathen Saxons could not be much worse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The hill-top was covered with the trippers who seem perpetually holidaying
+      on their island, and who were always kind to their children when they had
+      them, and to each other when they had not. They were commonly in couples,
+      very affectionate and inoffensively young. They wandered about, and from
+      time to time went and had tea at one of the tea-houses which are always at
+      hand over there. Except the view there was not much to see; the ways were
+      rough; now and then you came to a pink cottage or a white one where the
+      peasantry, again, sold tea. At one place in our walk over the occiput of
+      Great Orme&rsquo;s Head into the Happy Valley in its bosom, we fell a prey
+      to a conspiracy of boys selling mignonette: it appeared to be a mignonette
+      trust, or syndicate, confining its commerce to that flower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I have no other statistics to offer concerning business on Great Orme&rsquo;s
+      Head, or indeed in all Llandudno. One of the chief industries seemed to be
+      coaching, for a score of delightful places are to be easily reached by the
+      stages always departing from the hotels on the Parade. There was no
+      particularly noticeable traffic in leek, though I suppose that as I did
+      not see the national emblem in any Welshman&rsquo;s hat&mdash;to be sure,
+      it was not St. David&rsquo;s Day&mdash;it must have been boiling in every
+      Welshman&rsquo;s pot. I am rather ashamed to be joining, even at this
+      remove, in the poor English joking which goes on about the Welsh, quite as
+      much as about the Scotch, the Irish having become too grave a matter for
+      joking. There are little burlesque manuals making merry with the language
+      and its agglutinative prolixity, which I shall certainly not quote; and
+      there are postal-cards representing Welsh dames drinking tea in tall
+      witch-hats, with one of them saying: &ldquo;I wass enjoying myself
+      shocking, look you.&rdquo; There was, of course, nothing serious in this
+      joking; the Welsh, who have all the small commerce in their hands, gladly
+      sold the manuals and postals, and I did not see one Englishman laughing
+      over them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Saeseneg visitors rather amused themselves with the sea and the
+      resources of the beach and the bathing. As contrasted with the visitors at
+      Aberystwyth, so distinctly in the earlier and later stages of love-making,
+      I should say those at Llandudno were domestic: fathers and mothers who
+      used the long phalanx of bathing-machines appointed to their different
+      sexes, and their children who played in the sand. I thought the children
+      charming, and I contributed tuppence to aid in the repair of the sand
+      castle of two nice little boys which had fallen down; it now seems strange
+      that I should have been asked for a subscription, but in England
+      subscriptions spare nobody; though I wonder if two such nice little boys
+      would have come to me for money in America. Besides the entertainment of
+      lying all afternoon on the beach, or sitting beside it in canopied penny
+      chairs, there was more active diversion for all ages and sexes in the
+      circus prevailing somewhere in the background, and advertising itself
+      every afternoon by a procession of six young elephants neatly carrying
+      each in his trunk the tail of the elephant before him. There were also the
+      delightful shows of the amusement pier where one could go and see Pierrots
+      to one&rsquo;s heart&rsquo;s content, if one can ever get enough of
+      Pierrots; I never can.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0216}.jpg" alt="{0216}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0216}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      Besides all these daytime things there were two very good theatres, at one
+      of which I saw Mr. Barrie&rsquo;s <i>Little Mary</i> given better than in
+      New York (that was easy), and at the other a comic opera, with a bit of
+      comedy or tragedy in a stage-box, not announced in the bills. The audience
+      was otherwise decorous enough to be composed of Welsh Baptist elders and
+      their visiting friends, but in this box there were two young men in
+      evening dress, scuffling with a young woman in dinner décolletée, and what
+      appeared to be diamonds in her ears. They were trying, after what seems
+      the convention of English seaside flirtation, to get something out of her
+      hand, and allowing her successfully to resist them; and their playful
+      contest went on through a whole act to the distraction of the spectators,
+      who did not seem greatly scandalized. It suggested the misgiving that
+      perhaps bad people came to Llandudno for their summer outing as well as
+      good; but there was no interference by the police or the management with
+      this robust side-show. Were the actors in the scene, all or any of them,
+      too high in rank to be lightly molested in their lively event; or were
+      they too low? Perhaps they were merely tipsy, but all the same their
+      interlude was a contribution to the evening&rsquo;s entertainment which
+      would not have been so placidly accepted in, say, Atlantic City, or Coney
+      Island, or even Newport, where people are said to be more accustomed to
+      the caprices of society persons, and more indulgent of their whims.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      A more improving, and on the whole more pleasing, phase of the indigenous
+      life, and also more like a phase of our own, showed itself the day of our
+      visit to Conway, a little way from Llandudno. There, on our offering to
+      see the ruins of the wonderful and beautiful old castle, we were met at
+      the entrance with a demand for an exceptional shilling gate money, because
+      of the fair for the local Wesleyan Chapel which was holding in the
+      interior. What seemed at first a hardship turned out a chance which we
+      would not have missed on any account. There was a large tent set up in the
+      old castle court, and a table spread with home-made dainties of many
+      sorts, and waited upon by gentle maids and matrons who served one with tea
+      or whatever else one liked, all for that generously inclusive shilling.
+      They were Welsh, they told us, and they were speaking their language to
+      right and left of us, while they were so courteous to us in English. It
+      was quite like a church fair in some American village, where, however, it
+      could not have had the advantage of a ruined Norman castle for its scene,
+      and where it would not have provided a range for target practice with
+      air-guns, or grounds for running and jumping.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The place was filled with people young and old who were quietly amusing
+      themselves and were more taken up with the fair than with the castle. I
+      must myself comparatively slight the castle in the present study of people
+      rather than places, though I may note that if there is any more
+      interesting ruin in the world, I am satisfied with this which it
+      surpasses. Besides its beauty, what strikes one most is its perfect
+      adaptation to the original purpose of palace and fortress for which the
+      Normans planned their strongholds in Wales. The architect built not only
+      with a constant instinct of beauty, but with unsurpassable science and
+      skill. The skill and the science have gone the way of the need of them,
+      but the beauty remains indelible and as eternal as the hunger for it in
+      the human soul. Conway castle is not all a ruin, even as a fortress,
+      however. Great part of it still challenges decay, and is so entire in its
+      outward shape that it has inspired the railway running under its shoulder
+      to attempt a conformity of style in the bridge approaching it, but without
+      enabling it to an equal effect of grandeur. One would as soon the bridge
+      had not tried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All Conway is worthy, within its ancient walls, of as much devotion as one
+      can render it in the rain, which begins as soon as you leave the castle.
+      The walls climb from the waters to the hills, and the streets wander up
+      and down and seem to the stranger mainly to seek that beautiful old Tudor
+      house, Plas Mawr, which like the castle is without rival in its kind. It
+      was full of reeking and streaming sight-seers, among whom one could easily
+      find one&rsquo;s self incommoded without feeling one&rsquo;s self a part
+      of the incommodation, but in spite of them there was the assurance of
+      comfort as well as splendor in the noble old mansion, such as the
+      Elizabethan houses so successfully studied. In the dining-room a corner of
+      the mantel has its sandstone deeply worn away, and a much-elbowed
+      architect, who was taking measurements of the chimney, agreed that this
+      carf was the effect of the host or the butler flying to the place and
+      sharpening his knife for whatever haunch of venison or round of beef was
+      toward. It was a fine memento of the domestic past, and there was a secret
+      chamber where the refugees of this cause or that in other times were
+      lodged in great discomfort. Besides, there was a ghost which was fairly
+      crowded out of its accustomed quarters, where so far from being able to
+      walk, it would have had much ado to stand upright by flattening itself
+      against the wall.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In fact, there was not much more room that day in the Plas Mawr, than in
+      the Smallest House in the World, which is the next chiefest attraction of
+      Conway. This, too, was crammed with damp enthusiasts, passionately eager
+      to sign their names in the guest-book. They scarcely left space in the
+      sitting-room of ten by twelve feet for the merry old hostess selling
+      photographs and ironically inviting her visitors&rsquo; guests to a
+      glimpse of the chamber overhead, or so much of it as the bed allowed to be
+      seen. She seemed not to believe in her abode as a practicable tenement,
+      and could not be got to say that she actually lived in it; as to why it
+      was built so small she was equally vague. But there it was, to like or to
+      leave, and there, not far off, was the &ldquo;briny beach&rdquo; where the
+      Walrus and the Carpenter walked together,&mdash;
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     &ldquo;And wept like anything to see
+      Such quantities of sand.&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      For it was in Conway, as history or tradition is, that <i>Through the
+      Looking-Glass</i> was written.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There are very few places in those storied British Isles which are not
+      hallowed by some association with literature; but I suppose that Llandudno
+      is as exempt as any can be, and I will not try to invoke any dear and
+      honored shade from its doubtful obscurity. We once varied the even tenor
+      of our days there by driving to Penmaenmawr, and wreaking our love of
+      literary associations so far as we might by connecting the place with the
+      memory of Gladstone, who was literary as well as political. We thought
+      with him that Penmaenmawr was &ldquo;the most charming watering-place in
+      Wales,&rdquo; and as you drive into the place, the eye of faith will
+      detect the house, on the right, in which he spent many happy summers. We
+      contented ourselves with driving direct to the principal hotel, where I
+      know not what kept us from placing ourselves for life. We had tea and jam
+      en the pretty lawn, and the society of a large company of wasps of the
+      yellow-jacket variety, which must have been true Welsh wasps, as peaceful
+      as they were musical, and no interloping Scotch or Irish, for they did not
+      offer to attack us, but confined themselves altogether to our jam: to be
+      sure, we thought best to leave it to them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0222}.jpg" alt="{0222}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0222}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      It is said that the purple year is not purpler at any point on the
+      southernmost shores of England than it is at Llandudno. In proof of the
+      mildness of its winter climate, the presence of many sorts of tender
+      evergreens is alleged, and the persistence of flowers in blooming from
+      Christmas to Easter. But those who have known the deceitful habits of
+      flowers on the Riviera, where they bloom in any but an arctic degree of
+      cold, will not perhaps hurry to Llandudno much later than November. All
+      the way to Penmaenmawr the flowers showed us what they could do in summer,
+      whether in field or garden, and there was one beautiful hill on which
+      immense sweeps and slopes of yellow gorse and purple heather boldly
+      stretched separately, or mingled their dyes in the fearlessness of nature
+      when she spurns the canons of art. I suppose there is no upholsterer or
+      paperhanger who would advise mixing or matching yellow and purple in the
+      decoration of a room, but here the outdoor effect rapt the eye in a
+      transport of delight. It was indeed a day when almost any arrangement of
+      colors would have pleased.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It is not easy in that much summer-resorted region to get at the country
+      in other than its wilder moods; it is either town or mountain; but now and
+      then one found one&rsquo;s self among harvest-fields, where the yield of
+      wheat and oats was far heavier than with us, either because the soil was
+      richer or the tilth thorougher. The farms indeed looked very fertile, and
+      the farmhouses very alluringly clean and neat, at least on the outside.
+      They were not gray, as in the West of England, or brick as in the
+      Southeast, but were of stone whitewashed, and the roofs were of slate, and
+      not thatch or tile. As I have noted, they were not so much gathered into
+      villages as in England, and again, as I have noted, it is out of such
+      houses that the farmers&rsquo; boys and girls go to the co-educational
+      colleges of the Welsh University. It is still the preference of the
+      farmers that their sons should be educated for the ministry, which in that
+      country of multiplied dissents has pulpits for every color of
+      contrary-mindedness, as well as livings of the not yet disestablished
+      English Church. It is not indeed the English Church in speech. The Welsh
+      will have their service and their sermon in their own tongue, and when an
+      Oxford or Cambridge man is given a Welsh living, he must do what he can to
+      conform to the popular demand. It is said that in one case, where the
+      incumbent long held out against the parish, he compromised by reading the
+      service in Welsh with the English pronunciation. But the Welsh churches
+      are now supplied with Welsh-speaking clergy, though whether it is well for
+      the Welsh to cling so strongly to their ancient speech is doubted by many
+      Welshmen. These hold that it cramps and dwarfs the national genius; but in
+      the mean time in Ireland the national genius, long enlarged to our
+      universal English, offers the strange spectacle of an endeavor to climb
+      back into its Gaelic shell.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0226}.jpg" alt="{0226}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0226}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      I do not know whether an incident of my experience in coming from Chester
+      to Llandudno is to be offered as an illustration of Welsh manners or of
+      English manners. A woman of the middle rank, certainly below gentlewoman,
+      but very personable and well dressed, got into our carriage where there
+      was no seat for her. She was no longer young, but she was not so old as
+      the American who offered her his seat. She refused it, but consented to
+      sit on the hand-bag and rug which he arranged for her, and so remained
+      till she left the train, while a half-grown boy and several young men kept
+      their countenances and their places, not apparently dreaming of offering
+      her a seat, or if they thought of her at all, thought she was well
+      punished for letting the guard crowd her in upon us. By her stature and
+      complexion she was undoubtedly Welsh, and these youth from theirs were as
+      undoubtedly English. Perhaps, then, the incident had better be offered as
+      an illustration of Welsh and English manners combined.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /><br /> <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0010" id="link2H_4_0010"> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      Nothing is so individual in any man as the peculiar blend of
+      characteristics which he has inherited from his racial ancestries. The
+      Englishman, who leaves the stamp of the most distinct personality upon
+      others, is the most mixed, the most various, the most relative of all men.
+      He is not English except as he is Welsh, Dutch, and Norman, with &ldquo;a
+      little Latin and less Greek&rdquo; from his earliest visitors and
+      invaders. This conception of him will indefinitely simplify the study of
+      his nature if it is made in the spirit of the frank superficiality which I
+      propose to myself. After the most careful scrutiny which I shall be able
+      to give him, he will remain, for every future American, the contradiction,
+      the anomaly, the mystery which I expect to leave him.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      I
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      No error of the Englishman&rsquo;s latest invader is commoner than the
+      notion, which perhaps soonest suggests itself, that he is a sort of
+      American, tardily arriving at our kind of consciousness, with the
+      disadvantages of an alien environment, after apparently hopeless arrest in
+      unfriendly conditions. The reverse may much more easily be true; we may be
+      a sort of Englishmen, and the Englishman, if he comes to us and abides
+      with us, may become a sort of American. But that is the affair of a
+      possible future, and the actual Englishman is certainly not yet any sort
+      of American, unless, indeed, for good and for bad, he is a better sort of
+      Bostonian. He does not even speak the American language, whatever
+      outlandish accent he uses in speaking his own. It may be said, rather too
+      largely, too loosely, that the more cultivated he is, the more he will
+      speak like a cultivated American, until you come to the King, or the Royal
+      Family, with whom a strong German accent is reported to prevail. The
+      Englishman may write American, if he is a very good writer, but in no case
+      does he spell American. He prefers, as far as he remembers it, the Norman
+      spelling, and, the Conqueror having said &ldquo;<i>geôle</i>,&rdquo; the
+      Conquered print &ldquo;gaol,&rdquo; which the American invader must
+      pronounce &ldquo;jail,&rdquo; not &ldquo;gayol.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The mere mention of the Royal Family advances us to the most marked of all
+      the superficial English characteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is not
+      superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned
+      principle, but a passion induced by the general volition. Whatever it is,
+      it is one of the most explicitly as well as the most tacitly pervasive of
+      the English idiosyncrasies. A few years ago&mdash;say, fifteen or twenty&mdash;it
+      was scarcely known in its present form. It was not known at all with many
+      in the time of the latest and worst of the Georges, or the time of the
+      happy-go-lucky sailor William; in the earlier time of Victoria, it was a
+      chivalrous devotion among the classes, and with the masses an affection
+      which almost no other sovereign has inspired. I should not be going
+      farther than some Englishmen if I said that her personal character saved
+      the monarchy; when she died there was not a vestige of the republican
+      dream which had remained from a sentiment for &ldquo;the free peoples of
+      antiquity&rdquo; rather than from the Commonwealth. Democracy had indeed
+      effected itself in a wide-spread socialism, but the kingship was safe in
+      the hearts of the Queen&rsquo;s subjects when the Prince of Wales, who was
+      the first of them, went about praising loyalty as prime among the civic
+      virtues and duties. The notion took the general fancy, and met with an
+      acceptance in which the old superstition of kings by divine right was
+      resuscitated with the vulgar. One of the vulgar lately said to an American
+      woman who owned that we did not yield an equal personal fealty to all our
+      Presidents, &ldquo;Oh yes, but you know that it is only your <i>people</i>
+      that choose the President, but <i>God</i> gave us the King.&rdquo; Nothing
+      could be opposed to a belief so simple, as in the churches of the eldest
+      faith the humble worshipper could not well be told that the picture or the
+      statue of his adoration was not itself sacred. In fact, it is not going
+      too far, at least for a very adventurous spirit, to say that loyalty with
+      the English is a sort of religious principle. What is with us more or less
+      a joke, sometimes bad, sometimes good, namely, our allegiance to the
+      powers that be in the person of the Chief Magistrate, is with them a most
+      serious thing, at which no man may smile without loss.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I was so far from wishing myself to smile at it, that I darkled most
+      respectfully about it, without the courage to inquire directly into the
+      mystery. If it was often on my tongue to ask, &ldquo;What is loyalty? How
+      did you come by it? Why are you loyal?&rdquo;&mdash;I felt that it would
+      be embarrassing when it would not be offensive, and I should vainly plead
+      in excuse that this property of theirs mystified me the more because it
+      seemed absolutely left out of the American nature. I perceived that in the
+      English it was not less really present because it was mixed, or used to be
+      mixed, with scandal that the alien can do no more than hint at. That sort
+      of abuse has long ceased, and if one were now to censure the King, or any
+      of the Royal Family, it would be felt to be rather ill bred, and quite
+      unfair, since royalty is in no position to reply to criticism. Even the
+      Socialists would think it ill-mannered, though in their hearts, if not in
+      their sleeves, they must all the while be smiling at the notion of
+      anything sacred in the Sovereign.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0236}.jpg" alt="{0236}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0236}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      II
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Loyalty, like so many other things in England, is a convention to which
+      the alien will tacitly conform in the measure of his good taste or his
+      good sense. It is not his affair, and in the mean time it is a most
+      curious and interesting spectacle; but it is not more remarkable, perhaps,
+      than the perfect acquiescence in the aristocratic forms of society which
+      hedge the King with their divinity. We think that family counts for much
+      with ourselves, in New England or in Virginia; but it counts for nothing
+      at all in comparison with the face value at which it is current in
+      England. We think we are subject to our plutocracy, when we are very much
+      out of humor or out of heart, in some such measure as the commoners of
+      England are subject to the aristocracy; but that is nonsense. A very rich
+      man with us is all the more ridiculous for his more millions; he becomes a
+      byword if not a hissing; he is the meat of the paragrapher, the awful
+      example of the preacher; his money is found to smell of his methods. But
+      in England, the greater a nobleman is, the greater his honor. The American
+      mother who imagines marrying her daughter to an English duke, cannot even
+      imagine an English duke&mdash;say, like him of Devonshire, or him of
+      Northumberland, or him of Norfolk&mdash;with the social power and state
+      which wait upon him in his duchy and in the whole realm; and so is it in
+      degree down to the latest and lowest of the baronets, and of those yet
+      humbler men who have been knighted for their merits and services in
+      medicine, in literature, in art. The greater and greatest nobles are
+      established in a fear which is very like what the fear of God used to be
+      when the common people feared Him; and, though they are potent political
+      magnates, they mainly rule as the King himself does, through the secular
+      reverence of those beneath them for their titles and the visible images of
+      their state. They are wealthy men, of course, with so much substance that,
+      when one now and then attempts to waste it, he can hardly do so; but their
+      wealth alone would not establish them in the popular regard. His wealth
+      does no such effect for Mr. Astor in England; and mere money, though it is
+      much desired by all, is no more venerated in the person of its possessor
+      than it is with us. It is ancestry, it is the uncontested primacy of
+      families first in their place, time out of mind, that lays its resistless
+      hold upon the fancy and bows the spirit before it. By means of this comes
+      the sovereign effect in the political as well as the social state; for,
+      though the people vote into or out of power those who vote other people
+      into or out of the administration, it is always&mdash;or so nearly always
+      that the exception proves the rule&mdash;family that rules, from the King
+      down to the least attaché of the most unimportant embassy. No doubt many
+      of the English are restive under the fact; and, if one had asked their
+      mind about it, one might have found them frank enough; but, never asking
+      it, it was with amusement that I heard said once, as if such a thing had
+      never occurred to anybody before, &ldquo;Yes, isn&rsquo;t it strange that
+      those few families should keep it all among themselves!&rdquo; It was a
+      slender female voice, lifted by a young girl with an air of pensive
+      surprise, as at a curious usage of some realm of faery.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      III
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      England is in fact, to the American, always a realm of faery, in its
+      political and social constitution. It must be owned, concerning the
+      government by family, that it certainly seems to work well. That justifies
+      it, so far as the exclusion of the immense majority from the
+      administration of their own affairs can be justified by anything; though I
+      hold that the worst form of graft in office is hardly less justifiable:
+      that is, at least, one of the people picking their pockets. But it is the
+      universal make-believe behind all the practical virtue of the state that
+      constitutes the English monarchy a realm of faery. The whole population,
+      both the great and the small, by a common effort of the will, agree that
+      there is a man or a woman of a certain line who can rightfully inherit the
+      primacy amongst them, and can be dedicated through this right to live the
+      life of a god, to be so worshipped and flattered, so cockered about with
+      every form of moral and material flummery, that he or she may well be more
+      than human not to be made a fool of. Then, by a like prodigious stroke of
+      volition, the inhabitants of the enchanted island universally agree that
+      there is a class of them which can be called out of their names in some
+      sort of title, bestowed by some ancestral or actual prince, and can
+      forthwith be something different from the rest, who shall thenceforth do
+      them reverence, them and their heirs and assigns, forever. By this amusing
+      process, the realm of faery is constituted, a thing which could not have
+      any existence in nature, yet by its existence in fancy becomes the most
+      absolute of human facts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It is not surprising that, in the conditions which ensue, snobbishness
+      should abound; the surprising thing would be if it did not abound. Even
+      with ourselves, who by a seven years&rsquo; struggle burst the faery dream
+      a century ago, that least erected spirit rears its loathly head from the
+      dust at times, and in our polite press we can read much if we otherwise
+      see nothing of its subtle influence. But no evil is without its
+      compensating good, and the good of English snobbishness is that it has
+      reduced loyalty, whether to the prince or to the patrician, from a
+      political to a social significance. That is, it does so with the upper
+      classes; with the lower, loyalty finds expression in an unparalleled
+      patriotism. An Englishman of the humble or the humbler life may know very
+      well that he is not much in himself; but he believes that England stands
+      for him, and that royalty and nobility stand for England. Both of these,
+      there, are surrounded by an atmosphere of reverence wholly inconceivable
+      to the natives of a country where there are only millionaires to revere.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The most curious thing is that the persons in the faery dream seem to
+      believe it as devoutly as the simplest and humblest of the dreamers. The
+      persons in the dream apparently take themselves as seriously as if there
+      were or could be in reality kings and lords. They could not, of course, do
+      so if they were recently dreamed, as they were, say, in the France of the
+      Third Empire. There, one fancies, these figments must have always been
+      smiling in each other&rsquo;s faces when they were by themselves. But the
+      faery dream holds solidly in England because it is such a very old dream.
+      Besides, the dream does not interfere with the realities; it even honors
+      them. If a man does any great thing in England, the chief figure of the
+      faery dream recognizes his deed, stoops to him, lifts him up among the
+      other figures, and makes him part of the dream forever. After that he has
+      standing, such as no man may have with us for more than that psychological
+      moment, when all the papers cry him up, and then everybody tries to forget
+      him. But, better than this, the dream has the effect, if it has not the
+      fact, of securing every man in his place, so long as he keeps to it.
+      Nowhere else in the world is there so much personal independence, without
+      aggression, as in England. There is apparently nothing of it in Germany;
+      in Italy, every one is so courteous and kind that there is no question of
+      it; in the French Republic and in our own, it exists in an excess that is
+      molestive and invasive; in England alone does it strike the observer as
+      being of exactly the just measure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Very likely the observer is mistaken, and in the present case he will not
+      insist. After all, even the surface indications in such matters are slight
+      and few. But what I noted was that, though the simple and humble have to
+      go to the wall, and for the most part go to it unkicking, in England they
+      were, on their level, respectfully and patiently entreated. At a railroad
+      junction one evening, when there was a great hurrying up stairs and down,
+      and a mad seeking of wrong trains by right people, the company&rsquo;s
+      servants who were taking tickets, and directing passengers this way and
+      that, were patiently kind with futile old men and women, who came up, in
+      the midst of their torment, and pestered them with questions as to the
+      time when trains that had not arrived would leave after they did arrive. I
+      shuddered to think what would have at least verbally happened to such
+      inquirers with us; but, there, not only their lives but their feelings
+      were safe, and they could go away with such self-respect as they had quite
+      intact.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      V
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      In no country less good-hearted than England could anything so
+      wrong-headed as the English baggage system be suffered. But, there,
+      passengers of all kinds help the porters to sort their trunks from other
+      people&rsquo;s trunks, on arrival at their stations, and apparently think
+      it no hardship. The porters, who do not seem especially inspired persons,
+      have a sort of guiding instinct in the matter, and wonderfully seldom fail
+      to get the things together for the cab, or to get them off the cab, and,
+      duly labelled, into the luggage-van. Once, at a great junction, my porter
+      seemed to have missed my train, and after vain but not unconsidered
+      appeals to the guard, I had to start without it. At the next station, the
+      company telegraphed back at its own cost the voluminous message of my
+      anxiety and indignation, and I was assured that the next train would bring
+      my valise from Crewe to Edinburgh. When I arrived at Edinburgh, I casually
+      mentioned my trouble to a guard whom I had not seen before. He asked how
+      the bags were marked, and then he said they had come with us. My porter
+      had run with them to my train, but in despair of getting to my car with
+      his burden, had put them into the last luggage-van, and all I had to do
+      was now to identify them at my journey&rsquo;s end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Why one does not, guiltily or guiltlessly, claim other people&rsquo;s
+      baggage, I do not know; but apparently it is not the custom. Perhaps in
+      this, the deference for any one within his rights, peculiar to the faery
+      dream, operates the security of the respective owners of baggage that
+      could otherwise easily be the general prey. While I saw constant regard
+      paid for personal rights, I saw only one case in which they were
+      offensively asserted. This was in starting from York for London, when we
+      attempted to take possession of a compartment we had paid for from the
+      nearest junction, in order to make certain of it. We found it in the
+      keeping of a gentleman who had turned it from a non-smoking into a smoking
+      compartment, and bestrewn it with his cigar ashes. When told by the
+      porters that we had engaged the compartment, he refused to stir, and said
+      that he had paid for his seat, and he should not leave it till he was
+      provided with another. In vain they besought him to consider our hard
+      case, in being kept out of our own, and promised him another place as good
+      as the one he held. He said that he would not believe it till he saw it,
+      and as he would not go to see it, and it could not be brought to him,
+      there appeared little chance of our getting rid of him. I thought it best
+      to let him and the porters fight it out among themselves. When a force of
+      guards appeared, they were equally ineffective against the intruder, who
+      could not, or did not, say that he did not know the compartment was
+      engaged. Suddenly, for no reason, except that he had sufficiently stood,
+      or sat, upon his rights, he rose, and the others precipitated themselves
+      upon his hand-baggage, mainly composed of fishing-tackle, such as a
+      gentleman carries who has been asked to somebody&rsquo;s fishing, and bore
+      it away to another part of the train. They left one piece behind, and the
+      porter who came back for it was radiantly smiling, as if the struggle had
+      been an agreeable exercise, and he spoke of his antagonist without the
+      least exasperation; evidently, he regarded him as one who had justly
+      defended himself from corporate aggression; his sympathies were with him
+      rather than with us, perhaps because we had not so vigorously asserted
+      ourselves.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      A case in which a personal wrong rather than a personal right was
+      offensively asserted, was that of a lady, young and too fair to be so
+      unfair, in a crowded train coming from the Doncaster Races to York. She
+      had kept a whole first-class compartment to herself, putting her maid into
+      the second-class adjoining, and heaping the vacant seats with her
+      hand-baggage, which had also overflowed into the corridor. At the time the
+      train started she was comforting herself in her luxurious solitude with a
+      cup of tea, and she stood up, as if to keep other people out. But, after
+      waiting, seven of us, in the corridor, until she should offer to admit us,
+      we all swarmed in upon her, and made ourselves indignantly at home. When
+      it came to that she offered no protest, but gathered up her belongings,
+      and barricaded herself with them. Among the rest there was a
+      typewriting-machine, but what manner of young lady she was, or whether of
+      the journalistic or the theatrical tribe, has never revealed itself to
+      this day. We could not believe that she was very high-born, not nearly so
+      high, for instance, as the old lady who helped dispossess her, and who,
+      when we ventured the hope that it would not rain on the morrow, which was
+      to be St. Leger Day, almost lost the kindness for us inspired by some
+      small service, because we had the bad taste to suggest such a possibility
+      for so sacred a day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I never saw people standing in a train, except that once which I have
+      already noted, when in a very crowded car in Wales, two women, decent
+      elderly persons, got in and were suffered to remain on foot by the young
+      men who had comfortable places; no one dreamed, apparently, of offering to
+      give up his seat. But, on the other hand, a superior civilization is shown
+      in what I may call the manual forbearance of the trolley and railway folk,
+      who are so apt to nudge and punch you at home here, when they wish your
+      attention. The like happened to me only once in England, and that was at
+      Liverpool, where the tram conductor, who laid hands on me instead of
+      speaking, had perhaps been corrupted by the unseen American influences of
+      a port at which we arrive so abundantly and indiscriminately. I did not
+      resent the touch, though it is what every one is expected to do, if
+      aggrieved, and every one else does it in England. Within his rights, every
+      one is safe; though there may be some who have no rights. If there were, I
+      did not see them, and I suppose that, as an alien, I might have refused to
+      stand up and uncover when the band began playing <i>God Save the King</i>,
+      as it did at the end of every musical occasion; I might have urged that,
+      being no subject of the King, I did not feel bound to join in the general
+      prayer. But that would have been churlish, and, where every one had been
+      so civil to me, I did not see why I should not be civil to the King, in a
+      small matter. In the aggregate indeed, it is not a small matter, and I
+      suppose that the stranger always finds the patriotism of a country
+      molestive. Patriotism is, at any rate, very disagreeable, with the sole
+      exception of our own, which we are constantly wishing to share with other
+      people, especially with English people. We spare them none of it, even in
+      their own country, and yet many of us object to theirs; I feel that I am
+      myself being rather offensive about it, now, at this distance from them.
+      Upon the whole, not caring very actively for us, one way or the other,
+      they take it amiably; they try to get our point of view, and, as if it
+      were a thorn, self-sacrificially press their bosoms against it, in the
+      present or recent <i>entente cordiale</i>. None of their idiosyncrasies is
+      more notable than their patience, their kindness with our divergence from
+      them; but I am not sure that, having borne with us when we are by, they do
+      not take it out of us when we are away.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We are the poetry of a few, who, we like to think, have studied the most
+      deeply into the causes of our being, or its excuses. But you cannot always
+      be enjoying poetry, and I could well imagine that our lovers must
+      sometimes prefer to shut the page. The common gentleness comes from the
+      common indifference, and from something else that I will not directly
+      touch upon. What is certain is that, with all manner of strangers, the
+      English seem very gentle, when they meet in chance encounter. The average
+      level of good manners is high. My experience was not the widest, and I am
+      always owning it was not deep; but, such as it was, it brought me to the
+      distasteful conviction that in England I did not see the mannerless
+      uncouthness which I often see in America, not so often from high to low,
+      or from old to young, but the reverse. There may be much more than we
+      infer, at the moment, from the modulated voices, which sweetens casual
+      intercourse, but there are certain terms of respect, almost unknown to us,
+      which more obviously do that effect. It is a pity that democracy, being
+      the fine thing it essentially is, should behave so rudely. Must we come to
+      family government, in order to be filial or fraternal in our bearing with
+      one another? Why should we be so blunt, so sharp, so ironical, so brutal
+      in our kindness?
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The single-mindedness of the English is beautiful. It may not help to the
+      instant understanding of our jokes; but then, even we are not always
+      joking, and it does help to put us at rest and to make us feel safe. The
+      Englishman may not always tell the truth, but he makes us feel that we are
+      not so sincere as he; perhaps there are many sorts of sincerity. But there
+      is something almost caressing in the kindly pause that precedes his
+      perception of your meaning, and this is very pleasing after the sense of
+      always having your hearer instantly onto you. When, by a chance
+      indefinitely rarer than it is with us at home, one meets an Irishman in
+      England, or better still an Irishwoman, there is an instant lift of the
+      spirit; and, when one passes the Scotch border, there is so much lift
+      that, on returning, one sinks back into the embrace of the English
+      temperament, with a sigh for the comfort of its soft unhurried expectation
+      that there is really something in what you say which, will be clear
+      by-and-by.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Having said so much as this in compliance with the frequent American
+      pretence that the English are without humor, I wish to hedge in the
+      interest of truth. They certainly are not so constantly joking as we; it
+      does not apparently seem to them that fate can be propitiated by a habit
+      of pleasantry, or that this is so merry a world that one need go about
+      grinning in it. Perhaps the conditions with most of them are harder than
+      the conditions with most of us. But, thinking of certain Englishmen I have
+      known, I should be ashamed to join in the cry of those story-telling
+      Americans whose jokes have sometimes fallen effectless. It is true that,
+      wherever the Celt has leavened the doughier Anglo-Saxon lump, the
+      expectation of a humorous sympathy is greater; but there are subtile
+      spirits of Teutonic origin whose fineness we cannot deny, whose delicate
+      gayety is of a sort which may well leave ours impeaching itself of a
+      heavier and grosser fibre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No doubt you must sometimes, and possibly oftenest, go more than half-way
+      for the response to your humorous intention. Those subtile spirits are
+      shy, and may not offer it an effusive welcome. They are also of such an
+      exquisite honesty that, if they do not think your wit is funny, they will
+      not smile at it, and this may grieve some of our jokers. But, if you have
+      something fine and good in you, you need not be afraid they will fail of
+      it, and they will not be so long about finding it out as some travellers
+      say. When it comes to the grace of the imaginative in your pleasantry,
+      they will be even beforehand with you. But in their extreme of
+      impersonality they will leave the initiative to you in the matter of humor
+      as in others. They will no more seek out your peculiar humor than they
+      will name you in speaking with you.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      VIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Nothing in England seeks you out, except the damp. Your impressions, you
+      have to fight for them. What you see or hear seems of accident. The sort
+      of people you have read of your whole life, and are most intimate with in
+      fiction, you must surprise. They no more court observance than the birds
+      in whose seasonable slaughter society from the King down delights. In
+      fact, it is probable that, if you looked for both, you would find the
+      gunner shyer than the gunned. The pheasant and the fox are bred to give
+      pleasure by their chase; they are tenderly cared for and watched over and
+      kept from harm at the hands of all who do not wish to kill them for the
+      joy of killing, and they are not so elusive but they can be seen by easy
+      chance. The pheasant especially has at times all but the boldness of the
+      barnyard in his fearless port. Once from my passing train, I saw him
+      standing in the middle of a ploughed field, erect, distinct, like a statue
+      of himself, commemorative of the long ages in which his heroic death and
+      martyr sufferance have formed the pride of princes and the peril of
+      poachers. But I never once saw him shot, though almost as many gunners
+      pursue him as there are pheasants in the land. This alone shows how shy
+      the gunners are; and when once I saw the trail of a fox-hunt from the same
+      coign of vantage without seeing the fox, I felt that I had almost
+      indecently come upon the horse and hounds, and that the pink coats and the
+      flowery spread of the dappled dogs over the field were mine by a kind of
+      sneak as base as killing a fox to save my hens.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      IX
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Equally with the foxes and the pheasants, the royalties and nobilities
+      abound in English novels, which really form the chief means of our
+      acquaintance with English life; but the chances that reveal them to the
+      average unintroduced, unpresented American are rarer. By these chances, I
+      heard, out of the whole peerage, but one lord so addressed in public, and
+      that was on a railroad platform where a porter was reassuring him about
+      his luggage. Similarly, I once saw a lady of quality, a tall and girlish
+      she, who stood beside her husband, absently rubbing with her glove the
+      window of her motor, and whom but for the kind interest of our cabman we
+      might never have known for a duchess. It is by their personal uninsistence
+      largely, no doubt, that the monarchy and the aristocracy exist; the
+      figures of the faery dream remain blent with the background, and appear
+      from it only when required to lay cornerstones, or preside at races, or
+      teas or bazars, or to represent the masses at home and abroad, and
+      invisibly hold the viewless reins of government.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet it must not be supposed that the commoner sort of dreamers are never
+      jealous of these figments of their fancy. They are often so, and rouse
+      themselves to self-assertion as frequently as our Better Element flings
+      off the yoke of Tammany. At a fair, open to any who would pay, for some
+      forgotten good object, such as is always engaging the energies of society,
+      I saw moving among the paying guests the tall form of a nobleman who had
+      somehow made himself so distasteful to his neighbors that they were not
+      his friends, and regularly voted down his men, whether they stood for
+      Parliament or County Council, and whether they were better than the
+      popular choice or not. As a matter of fact, it was said that they were
+      really better, but the people would not have them because they were his;
+      and one of the theories of English manliness is that the constant pressure
+      from above has toughened the spirit and enabled Englishmen to stand up
+      stouter and straighter each in his place, just as it is contended
+      elsewhere that the aesthetic qualities of the human race have been
+      heightened by its stresses and deprivations in the struggle of life.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For my own part, I believe neither the one theory nor the other. People
+      are the worse for having people above them, and are the ruder and coarser
+      for having to fight their way. If the triumph of social inequality is such
+      that there are not four men in London who are not snobs, it cannot boast
+      itself greater than the success of economic inequality with ourselves,
+      among whom the fight for money has not produced of late a first-class
+      poet, painter, or sculptor. The English, if they are now the manliest
+      people under the sun, have to thank not their masters but themselves, and
+      a nature originally so generous that no abuse could lastingly wrong it, no
+      political absurdity spoil it. But if this nature had been left free from
+      the beginning, we might see now a nation of Englishmen who, instead of
+      being bound so hard and fast in the bonds of an imperial patriotism, would
+      be the first in a world-wide altruism. Yet their patriotism is so devout
+      that it may well pass itself off upon them for a religious emotion,
+      instead of the superstition which seems to the stranger the implication of
+      an England in the next world as well as in this.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      X
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      We fancy that, because we have here an Episcopal Church, with its
+      hierarchy, we have something equivalent to the English Church. But that is
+      a mistake. The English Church is a part of the whole of English life, as
+      the army or navy is; in English crowds, the national priest is not so
+      frequent as the national soldier, but he is of as marked a quality, and as
+      distinct from the civil world, in uniform, bearing, and aspect; in the
+      cathedral towns, he and his like form a sort of spiritual garrison. At
+      home here you may be ignorant of the feasts of the Episcopal Church
+      without shame or inconvenience; but in England you had better be versed in
+      the incidence of all the holy days if you would stand well with other men,
+      and would know accurately when the changes in the railroad time-tables
+      will take place. It will not do to have ascertained the limits of Lent;
+      you must be up in the Michaelmases and Whitmondays, and the minor saints&rsquo;
+      days. When once you have mastered this difficult science, you will realize
+      what a colossal transaction the disestablishment of the English Church in
+      England would be, and how it would affect the whole social fabric.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, even when you have learned your lesson, it will not be to you as that
+      knowledge which has been lived, and which has no more need ever to
+      question itself than the habitual pronunciation of words. If one has moved
+      in good English society, one has no need ever to ask how a word is
+      pronounced, far less to go to the dictionary; one pronounces it as one has
+      always heard it pronounced. The sense of this gives the American a sort of
+      despair, like that of a German or French speaking foreigner, who perceives
+      that he never will be able to speak English. The American is rather worse
+      off, for he has to subdue an inward rebellion, and to form even the wish
+      to pronounce some English words as the English do. He has, for example,
+      always said &ldquo;financier,&rdquo; with the accent on the last syllable;
+      and if he has consulted his Webster he has found that there was no choice
+      for him. Then, when he hears it pronounced at Oxford by the head of a
+      college with the accent on the second syllable, and learns on asking that
+      it is never otherwise accented in England, his head whirls a little, and
+      he has a sick moment, in which he thinks he had better let the verb
+      &ldquo;to be&rdquo; govern the accusative as the English do, and be done
+      with it, or else telegraph for his passage home at once. Or stop! He must
+      not &ldquo;telegraph,&rdquo; he must &ldquo;wire.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      As for that breathing in the wrong place which is known as dropping one&rsquo;s
+      aitches, I found that in the long time between the first and last of my
+      English sojourns, there had arisen the theory that it was a vice purely
+      cockney in origin, and that it had grown upon the nation through the
+      National Schools. It is grossly believed, or boldly pretended, that till
+      the National School teachers had conformed to the London standard in their
+      pronunciation the wrong breathing was almost unknown in England, but that
+      now it was heard everywhere south of the Scottish border. Worse yet, the
+      teachers in the National Schools had scattered far and wide that peculiar
+      intonation, that droll slip or twist of the vowel sounds by which the
+      cockney alone formerly proclaimed his low breeding, and the infection is
+      now spread as far as popular learning. Like the wrong breathing, it is
+      social death &ldquo;to any he that utters it,&rdquo; not indeed that swift
+      extinction which follows having your name crossed by royalty from the list
+      of guests at a house where royalty is about to visit, but a slow,
+      insidious malady, which preys upon its victim, and finally destroys him
+      after his life-long struggle to shake it off. It is even worse than the
+      wrong breathing, and is destined to sweep the whole island, where you can
+      nowhere, even now, be quite safe from hearing a woman call herself &ldquo;a
+      lydy.&rdquo; It may indeed be the contagion of the National School
+      teacher, but I feel quite sure, from long observation of the wrong
+      breathing, that the wrong breathing did not spread from London through the
+      schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of the unbred in
+      England as nasality is with us. Both infirmities are of national origin
+      and extent, and both are individual or personal in their manifestation.
+      That is, some Americans in every part of the Union talk through their
+      noses; some Englishmen in every part of the kingdom drop their aitches.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The English-speaking Welsh often drop their aitches, as the
+      English-speaking French do, though the Scotch and Irish never drop them,
+      any more than the Americans, or the English of the second generation among
+      us; but the extremely interesting and great little people of Wales are
+      otherwise as unlike the English as their mother-language is. They seem
+      capable of doing anything but standing six feet in their stockings, which
+      is such a very common achievement with the English, but that is the fault
+      of nature which gave them dark complexions and the English fair. Where the
+      work of the spirit comes in, it effects such a difference between the two
+      peoples as lies between an Eisteddfod and a horse-race. While all the
+      singers of Wales met in artistic emulation at their national musical
+      festival at Rhyl, all the gamblers of England met in the national pastime
+      of playing the horses at Doncaster. More money probably changed hands on
+      the events at Doncaster than at Rhyl, and it was characteristic of the
+      prevalent influence in the common civilization (if there is a civilization
+      common to both races) that the King was at Doncaster and not at Rhyl. But
+      I do not say this to his disadvantage, for I was myself at Doncaster and
+      not at Rhyl. You cannot, unless you have a very practised ear, say which
+      is the finer singer at an Eisteddfod, but almost any one can see which
+      horse comes in first at a race.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      What is most striking in the mixture of strains in England is that it
+      apparently has not ultimately mixed them; and perhaps after a thousand
+      years the racial traits will be found marking Americans as persistently.
+      We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be assimilating, the different
+      voluntary and involuntary immigrations; but doubtless after two thousand
+      years the African, the Celt, the Scandinavian, the Teuton, the Gaul, the
+      Hun, the Latin, the Slav will be found atavistically asserting his origin
+      in certain of their common posterity. The Pennsylvania Germans have as
+      stolidly maintained their identity for two centuries as the Welsh in Great
+      Britain for twenty, or, so far as history knows, from the beginning of
+      time. The prejudices of one British stock concerning another are as lively
+      as ever, apparently, however the enmities may have worn themselves away.
+      One need not record any of these English prejudices concerning the Scotch
+      or Irish; they are too well known; but I may set down the opinion of a
+      lively companion in a railroad journey that the Welsh are &ldquo;the prize
+      liars of the universe.&rdquo; He was an expert accountant by profession,
+      and his affairs took him everywhere in the three Kingdoms, and this was
+      his settled error; for the Welsh themselves know that, if they sometimes
+      seem the prey of a lively imagination, it is the philologically noted
+      fault of their language, which refuses to lend itself to the accurate
+      expression of fact, but which would probably afford them terms for
+      pronouncing the statement of my accountant inexact. He was perhaps a man
+      of convictions rather than conclusions, for, though he was a bright
+      intelligence, of unusually varied interests, there were things that had
+      never appealed to him. We praised together the lovely September landscape
+      through which we were running, and I ventured some remark upon the large
+      holdings of the land: a thing that always saddened me in the face of
+      nature with the reflection that those who tilled the soil owned none of
+      it; though I ought to have remembered the times when the soil owned them,
+      and taken heart. My notion seemed to strike him for the first time, but he
+      dismissed the fact as a necessary part of the English system; it had never
+      occurred to him that there could be question of that system. There must be
+      many Englishmen to whom it does occur, but if you do not happen to meet
+      them you cannot blame the others.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I fancied that one of the Englishmen to whom it might have occurred was he
+      whom I met in Wales at Aberystwyth, where we spoke together a moment in
+      the shadow of the co-educational University there, and who seemed at least
+      of a different mind concerning the Welsh. &ldquo;These Welsh farmers,&rdquo;
+      he said, &ldquo;send their sons and daughters to college as if it were
+      quite the natural thing to do. But just imagine a Dorsetshire peasant
+      sending his boy to a University!&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      We suppose that the large holdings of land are the effect of wrongs and
+      abuses now wholly in the past, and that the causes for their increase are
+      no longer operative, but are something like those geological laws by which
+      the strata under them formed themselves. Once, however, in driving through
+      the most beautiful part of England, which I will not specify because every
+      part of England is the most beautiful, I came upon an illustration of the
+      reverse, as signal as the spectacle of a landslide. It was the
+      accumulation, not merely within men&rsquo;s memories, but within the
+      actual generation, of vast bodies of land in the hold of a great nobleman
+      who had contrived a title in them by the simple device of enclosing the
+      people&rsquo;s commons. It was a wrong, but there was no one of the
+      wronged who was brave enough or rich enough to dispute it through the
+      broken law, and no witness public-spirited enough to come to their aid.
+      Such things make us think patiently, almost proudly, of our national
+      foible of graft, which may really be of feudal origin. Doubtless the
+      aggression was attacked in the press, but we all know what the attacks of
+      the press amount to against the steadfast will of a powerful corporation,
+      and a great nobleman in England is a powerful corporation. In this
+      instance he had not apparently taken the people&rsquo;s land without some
+      wish to make them a return for it. He had built a handsome road through
+      their property, which he maintained in splendid condition, and he allowed
+      them to drive over his road, and to walk freely in certain portions of
+      their woods. He had also built a magnificent hospital for them, and it
+      seemed rather hard, then, to hear that one of the humblest of them had
+      been known to speak of him in whispered confidence as a &ldquo;Upas tree.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Probably he was not personally a Upas tree, probably the rancor toward him
+      left from being bawled after by one of his gatemen at a turning we had
+      taken in his enclosure, &ldquo;That&rsquo;s a private path!&rdquo; was
+      unjust. There was no sign, such as everywhere in England renders a place
+      secure from intrusion. The word &ldquo;Private&rdquo; painted up anywhere
+      does the effect of bolts and bars and of all obsolete man-traps beyond it,
+      and is not for a moment that challenge to the wayfaring foot which it
+      seems so often with us; but the warnings to the public which we make so
+      mandatory, the English language with unfailing gentleness. You are not
+      told to keep your foot or your wheel to a certain pathway; you are &ldquo;requested,&rdquo;
+      and sometimes even &ldquo;kindly requested&rdquo;; I do not know but once
+      I was &ldquo;respectfully requested.&rdquo; Perhaps that nobleman&rsquo;s
+      possession of these lands was so new that his retainers had to practise
+      something of unwonted rudeness in keeping it wholly his where he chose. At
+      any rate, the rule of civility is so universal that the politeness from
+      class to class is, for what the stranger sees, all but unfailing. I dare
+      say he does not see everything, even the Argus-eyed American, but
+      apparently the manners of the lower class, where they have been touched by
+      the upper, have been softened and polished to the same consistence and
+      complexion. When it comes to the proffers, and refusals, and insistences,
+      and acceptances between people of condition, such as I witnessed once in a
+      crowded first-class carriage from London on an Oxford holiday, nothing
+      could be more gently urgent, more beautifully forbearing. If the writers
+      of our romantic novels could get just those manners into their fiction, I
+      should not mind their dealing so much with the English nobility and
+      gentry; for those who intend being our nobility and gentry, by-and-by,
+      could not do better than study such high-breeding.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      If we approach the morals of either superiors or inferiors, we are in a
+      region where it behooves us to tread carefully. To be honest, I know
+      nothing about them, and I will not assume to know anything. I heard from
+      authority which I could not suspect of posing for omniscience that the
+      English rustics were apt to be very depraved, but they may on the other
+      hand be saints for all that I can prove against them. They are
+      superstitious, it is said, and there are few villages or old houses that
+      have not their tutelary spectres. The belief in ghosts is almost universal
+      among the people; as I may allow without superiority, for I do not know
+      but I believe in them myself, and there are some million of American
+      spiritualists who make an open profession of faith in them. It is said
+      also that the poor in England are much spoiled by the constant aid given
+      them in charity. This is supposed to corrupt them, and to make them
+      dependent upon the favors of fortune, rather than the sweat of their
+      brows. On the other hand, they often cannot get work, as I infer from the
+      armies of the unemployed, and, in these cases, I cannot hold them greatly
+      to blame if they bless their givers by their readiness to receive. If one
+      may infer from the incessant beneficences, and the constant demands for
+      more and more charities, one heaped upon another, there are more good
+      objects in England than anywhere else under the sun, for one only gives to
+      good objects, of course. The oppression of the subscriptions is tempered
+      by the smallness of the sum which may satisfy them. &ldquo;Five shillings
+      is a subscription,&rdquo; said a friend who was accused of really always
+      giving five pounds.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XIV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The English rich do not give so spectacularly as our rich do&mdash;that
+      is, by handfuls of millions, but then the whole community gives more, I
+      think, than our community does, and when it does not give, the necessary
+      succor is taxed out of its incomes and legacies. I do not mean that there
+      is no destitution, but only that the better off seem to have the worse off
+      more universally and perpetually in mind than with us. All this is
+      believed to be very demoralizing to the poor, and doubtless the certainty
+      of soup and flannel is bad for the soul of an old woman whose body is
+      doubled up with rheumatism. The Church seems to blame for much of the evil
+      that ensues from giving something to people who have nothing; but I dare
+      say the Dissenters are also guilty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Just how much is wanted to stay the stomach of a healthy pauper, it would
+      be hard to say; but now and then the wayfarer gets some hint of the
+      frequency if not the amount of feeding among the poor who are able to feed
+      themselves. One day, in the outskirts&mdash;they were very tattered and
+      draggled&mdash;of Liverpool, we stopped at a pastry-shop, where the kind
+      woman &ldquo;thought she could accommodate&rdquo; us with a cup of tea,
+      though she was terribly pressed with custom from all sorts of minute maids
+      and small boys coming in for &ldquo;penn&rsquo;orths&rdquo; of that
+      frightful variety of tart and cake which dismays the beholder from
+      innumerable shop windows in England. When we were brought our safer
+      refection, we noted her activities to the hostess, and she said, &ldquo;Yes,
+      they all want a bit of cake with their tea, even the poorest&rdquo;; and
+      when we ventured our supposition that they made their afternoon tea the
+      last meal of the day, she laughed at the notion. &ldquo;Last meal! They
+      have a good supper before they go to bed. Indeed, they all want their four
+      meals a day.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Another time, thriftily running in a third-class carriage from Crewe to
+      Chester, I was joined by a friendly man who addressed me with the frank
+      cordiality of the lower classes in recognizing one of their sort. &ldquo;They
+      don&rsquo;t know how to charge!&rdquo; he said, with an irony that
+      referred to the fourpence he had been obliged to pay for a cup of station
+      tea; and when I tried to allege some mitigating facts in behalf of the
+      company, he readily became autobiographical. The transition from tea to
+      eating generally was easy, and he told me that he was a plumber, going to
+      do a job of work at Llandudno, where he had to pay fourteen bob, which I
+      knew to be shillings and mentally translated into $3.50, a week for his
+      board. His wages were $1.50 a day, which the reader who multiplies
+      fourpence by twenty, to make up the difference in money values, will find
+      to be the wages of a good mechanic in the first Edward&rsquo;s time, five
+      hundred years ago. On this he professed to live very well. He rose every
+      morning at half-past four, and at six he had a breakfast of bread, butter,
+      and coffee; at nine he had porridge and coffee; at one, he had soup, meat,
+      and eggs, and perhaps beer; at night, after he got home from work, he had
+      a stew and a bit of meat, and perhaps beer, with Mother. He thought that
+      English people ate too much, generally, and especially on Sunday, when
+      they had nothing else to do. Most men never came home without asking,
+      &ldquo;Well, Mother, what have you got for me to eat now?&rdquo; When I
+      remembered how sparely our farm people and mechanics fared, I thought that
+      he was right, or they were wrong; for the puzzling fact remained that they
+      looked gaunt and dyspeptic, and he hale and fresh, though the difference
+      may have had as much to do with the air as the food. I liked him, and I
+      cannot leave him without noting that he was of the lean-faced, slightly
+      aquiline British type, with a light mustache; he was well dressed and well
+      set up, and he spoke strongly, as North Britons do, with nothing of our
+      people&rsquo;s husky whine. I found him on further acquaintance of
+      anti-Chamberlain politics, pro-Boer as to the late war, and rather
+      socialistic. He blamed the labor men for not choosing labor men to office
+      instead of the gentry who offered themselves. He belonged to a plumbers&rsquo;
+      union, and he had nothing to complain of, but he inferred that the
+      working-man was better off in America, from the fact that none of his
+      friends who had gone to the States ever came home to stay, though they
+      nearly all came home for a holiday, sooner or later. He differed from my
+      other friend, the accountant, in being very fond of the Welsh; it must be
+      owned their race seemed to have acquired merit with him through the tip of
+      two sovereigns which his last employer in Llandudno had given him. On the
+      other hand, he had no love for the Italians who were coming in, especially
+      at Glasgow. In Glasgow, he said, there were more drunken women than
+      anywhere else in the world, though there was no public-house drinking with
+      them as in London. This, so far as I got at it, formed his outlook on
+      life, but I dare say there was more of it.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XV
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      I was always regretting that I got at the people so little, and that only
+      chance hints of what they were thinking and feeling reached me. Now and
+      then, a native observer said something about them which seemed luminous.
+      &ldquo;We are frightfully feudal,&rdquo; such an observer said, &ldquo;especially
+      the poor.&rdquo; He did not think it a fault, I believe, and only used his
+      adverb intensifyingly, for he was of a Tory mind. He meant the poor among
+      the country people, who have at last mastered that principle of the feudal
+      system which early enabled the great nobles to pay nothing for the
+      benefits they enjoyed from it. But my other friend, the plumber, was not
+      the least feudal, or not so feudal as many a lowly ward-heeler in New
+      York, who helps to make up the muster of some captain of politics, under
+      the lead of a common boss. The texture of society, in the smarter sense,
+      the narrower sense, is what I could not venture to speak of more
+      confidently. Once I asked a friend, a very dear and valued friend, whether
+      a man&rsquo;s origin or occupation would make any difference in his social
+      acceptance, if he were otherwise interesting and important. He seemed not
+      to know what I would be at, and, when he understood, he responded with
+      almost a shout of amazement, &ldquo;Oh, not the least in the world!&rdquo;
+      But I have my doubts still; and I should say that it might be as difficult
+      for a very cultivated and agreeable man servant to get on in London
+      society, as for an artist or poet to feel at home in the first circles of
+      New York. Possibly, however, London society, because of its almost
+      immeasurable vastness, can take in more of more sorts of people, without
+      the consciousness of differences which keeps our own first circles so
+      elect. I venture, somewhat wildly, somewhat unwarrantably, the belief that
+      English society is less sensitive to moral differences than ours, and that
+      people with their little <i>taches</i> would find less anxiety in London
+      than in New York lest they should come off on the people they rubbed
+      against. Some Americans, who, even with our increasing prevalence of
+      divorces, are not well seen at home, are cheerfully welcomed in England.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps, there, all Americans, good and bad, high and low, coarse and
+      fine, are the same to senses not accustomed to our varying textures and
+      shades of color; that is a matter I should be glad to remand to the
+      psychologist, who will have work enough to do if he comes to inquire into
+      such mysteries. One can never be certain just how the English take us, or
+      how much, or whether they take us at all. Oftenest I was inclined to think
+      that we were imperceptible to them, or that, when we were perceptible,
+      they were aware of us as Swedenborg says the most celestial angels are
+      aware of evil spirits, merely as something angular. Americans were
+      distressful to their consciousness, they did not know why; and then they
+      tried to ignore us. But perhaps this is putting it a little fantastically.
+      What I know is that one comes increasingly to reserve the fact of one&rsquo;s
+      nationality, when it is not essential to the occasion, and to become as
+      much as possible an unknown quality, rather than a quality aggressive or
+      positive. Sometimes, when I could feel certain of my ground, I ventured my
+      conviction that Englishmen were not so much interested in Americans as
+      those Americans who stayed at home were apt to think; but when I once
+      expressed this belief to a Unitarian minister, whom I met in the West of
+      England, he received it with surprise and refusal. He said that in his own
+      immediate circle, at least, his friends were interested and increasingly
+      interested in America, what she was and what she meant to be, and still
+      looked toward her for the lead in certain high things which Englishmen
+      have ceased to expect of themselves. My impression is that most of the
+      most forward of the English Sociologists regard America as a back number
+      in those political economics which imply equality as well as liberty in
+      the future. They do not see any difference between our conditions and
+      theirs, as regards the man who works for his living with his hands, except
+      that wages are higher with us, and that physically there is more
+      elbow-room, though mentally and morally there is not. Save a little in my
+      Unitarian minister, and this only conjecturally, I did not encounter that
+      fine spirit which in Old England used to imagine the New World we have not
+      quite turned out to be; but once I met an Englishman who had lived in
+      Canada, and who, gentleman-bred as he was, looked back with fond
+      homesickness to the woods where he had taken up land, and built himself a
+      personable house, chiefly with his own hands. He had lived himself out of
+      touch with his old English life in that new country, and had drawn breath
+      in an opener and livelier air which filled his lungs as the home
+      atmosphere never could again.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XVI
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      Yet he was standing stiffly up for himself, and strewing his convictions
+      and opinions broadcast as the English all do when pressed by circumstance,
+      while we, with none of their shyness, mostly think our thoughts to
+      ourselves. I suppose we do it because we like better than they to seem of
+      one effect with the rest of our kind. In England one sees a variety of
+      dress in men which one rarely sees at home. They dress there not only in
+      keeping with their work and their play, but in the indulgence of any freak
+      of personal fancy, so that in the street of a provincial town, like Bath,
+      for instance, you will encounter in a short walk a greater range of
+      trousers, leggings, caps, hats, coats, jackets, collars, scarfs, boots and
+      shoes, of tan and black, than you would meet at home in a month of
+      Sundays. The differences do not go to the length of fashions, such as
+      reduce our differences to uniformity, and clothe, say, our legs in
+      knickerbockers till it is found everybody is wearing them, when
+      immediately nobody wears them. Only ladies, of fashions beyond men&rsquo;s,
+      gratify caprices like ours, and even these perhaps not voluntarily. In the
+      obedience they show to the rule that they must never wear the same dinner
+      or ball gown twice, it was said (but who can ever find out the truth of
+      such things?) that they sometimes had sent home from the dressmaker&rsquo;s
+      a number of dresses on liking, and wore them in succession, only to return
+      them, all but one at least, as not liked, the dressmaker having found her
+      account in her work being shown in society.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0266}.jpg" alt="{0266}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0266}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <p>
+      I do not know just what is to be inferred from a social fact or statement
+      like this, but I may say that the devotion to an ideal of social position
+      is far deeper with the English than with us. Whether we spend more or not,
+      I believe that the English live much nearer their incomes than Americans
+      do. I think that we save more out of our earnings than they out of theirs,
+      and that in this we are more like the Continental peoples, the French or
+      the Italians. They spend vastly more on state than we do, because, for one
+      thing, they have more state to spend on. A man may continue to make money
+      in America, and not change his manner of living till he chooses, and he
+      may never change it. Such a thing could not happen to an Englishwoman as
+      happened to the elderly American housewife who walked through the
+      magnificent house which her husband had bought to surprise her, and sighed
+      out at last, &ldquo;Well, now I suppose I shall have to keep a girl!&rdquo;
+      The girl would have been kept from the beginning of her husband&rsquo;s
+      prosperity, and multiplied, till the house was full of servants. If you
+      have the means of a gentleman in England, you must live like a gentleman,
+      apparently; you cannot live plainly, and put by, and largely you must
+      trust to your life-insurance as the fortune you will leave your heirs. It
+      cannot be denied that the more generous expenditure of the English adds to
+      the grace of life, and that they are more hospitable according to their
+      means than we are; or than those Continental peoples who are not
+      hospitable at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A thing that one feels more and more irritatingly in England is that,
+      while with other foreigners we stand on common ground, where we may be as
+      unlike them as we choose, with the English we always stand on English
+      ground, where we can differ only at our peril, and to our disadvantage. A
+      person speaking English and bearing an English name, had better be
+      English, for if he cannot it shows, it proves, that there is something
+      wrong in him. Our misfortune is that our tradition, and perhaps our
+      inclination, obliges us to be un-English, whereas we do not trouble
+      ourselves to be un-French, or un-Italian, for we are so by nature. The
+      effort involved in distinguishing ourselves breeds a sort of annoyance, or
+      call it no more than uneasiness, which is almost as bad as a bad
+      conscience; and in our sense of hopeless perdition we turn vindictively
+      upon our judge. But that is not fair and it is not wise; he does not mean
+      to be our judge, except when he comes to us for the purpose; in his own
+      house, he is civilly unaware of putting us to any test whatever. If you
+      ask him whether he likes this thing or that of ours, he will tell you
+      frankly; he never can see why he should not be frank; he has a kind of
+      helplessness in always speaking the truth; and he does not try to make it
+      palatable.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XVII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      An English Radical, who would say of his King no more than that he was a
+      good little man, and most useful in promoting friendship with France, was
+      inclined to blame us because we did not stay by at the time of our
+      Revolution, and help them fight out as Englishmen the fight for English
+      freedom. He had none of the loyalty of sentiment which so mystifies the
+      American, but plenty of the loyalty of reason, and expected a Utopia which
+      should not be of political but of economical cast. But one was always
+      coming upon illustrations of the loyalty of sentiment with which of course
+      one could have no quarrel, for their patriotism seldom concerned us,
+      except rather handsomely to include us. The French have ceased to be the
+      hereditary enemy, and the Russians have now taken their place in the
+      popular patriotism. I always talked with the lower classes when I could,
+      perhaps because I felt myself near them in my unworthy way, and one
+      evening in a grassy lane I made the acquaintance of a friendly man letting
+      his horse browse the wayside turf. He was in the livery-stable line, but
+      he had been a soldier many years. Upon this episode he became freely
+      autobiographical, especially concerning his service in India. He
+      volunteered the declaration that he had had enough of war, but he added,
+      thoughtfully, &ldquo;I should like to go out for a couple of years if
+      there was any trouble with Russia.&rdquo;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The love of England comes out charmingly in the swarming of English
+      tourists in every part of their country. Americans may sometimes outnumber
+      them at the Continental shrines, but we are in a pitiful minority at the
+      memorable places in England; in fact, we are nowhere beside the natives. I
+      liked their fondness for their own so much that I never could feel the
+      fine scorn for &ldquo;trippers&rdquo; which I believe all persons of
+      condition ought to assume. Even when the trippers did not seem very
+      intelligently interested in what they saw, they were harmlessly employed,
+      for a scene of beauty, or of historic appeal, could not be desecrated by
+      the courtships which are constantly going on all over England, especially
+      at the holiday seasons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The English are, indeed, great holiday-makers, even when past the age of
+      putting their arms around one another&rsquo;s waists. The many and many
+      seaside resorts form the place of their favorite outings, where they try
+      to spend such days and weeks of the late summer as their savings will pay
+      for. It is said that families in very humble station save the year round
+      for these vacations, and, having put by twelve or fifteen pounds, repair
+      to some such waterside as Blackpool, or its analogue in their
+      neighborhood, and lavish them upon the brief joy of the time. They take
+      the cheaper lodgings, and bring with them the less perishable provisions,
+      and lead a life of resolute gayety on the sands and in the sea, and at the
+      pier-ends where the negro minstrels and the Pierrots, who equally abound,
+      make the afternoons and evenings a delight which no one would suspect from
+      their faces to be the wild thing it is. If they go home at the end &ldquo;high
+      sorrowful and cloyed,&rdquo; there is no forecast of it in their demeanor,
+      which is as little troubled as it is animated. The young people are even
+      openly gay, and the robustness of their flirtations adds sensibly to the
+      interest of the spectator. Our own public lovers seem of a humbler sort,
+      and they mostly content themselves with the passive embraces of which
+      every seat in our parks affords an example; but in England such lovers add
+      playful struggles. A favorite pastime seemed to be for one of them to hold
+      something in the hand, and for the other to try prying it open. When it
+      was the young man who kept his hand shut, the struggle could go on almost
+      indefinitely. I suppose it led to many engagements and marriages.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the young people were not walking up and down, or playfully
+      scuffling, they were reading novels; in fact, I do not imagine that
+      anywhere else in the world is there a half, or a tenth part, so much
+      fiction consumed as in the English summer resorts. It is probably of the
+      innutritious lightness of pop-corn; I had never the courage to look at the
+      volumes which I could so easily have overlooked; but I am sure it was all
+      out of the circulating library. As there were often several young women to
+      one man, most of the girls had to content themselves with the flirtations
+      in the books, where, I dare say, the heroines were always prying the
+      heroes&rsquo; hands open. On every seat one found them poring upon the
+      glowing page, and met them in every walk with a volume under the arm, and
+      another clasped to the heart. At places where the hand played, and they
+      were ostensibly listening to the music, they were bowed upon their books,
+      and the flutter of the turning leaves almost silenced the blare of the
+      horns. By what inspiration they knew when <i>God Save the King</i> was
+      coming, and rose with a long sigh heaved in common, I should not be able
+      to say. Perhaps they always reached the end of a story at the time the
+      band came to that closing number, or perhaps they felt its imminence in
+      their nerves. The fiction was not confined to the young girls, however.
+      Both sexes and all ages partook of it; I saw as many old girls as young
+      girls reading novels, and mothers of families were apparently as much
+      addicted to the indulgence. I suppose they put by their books when they
+      took tea, which is the other most noticeable dissipation in England. But I
+      cannot enter upon that chapter; it is too large a theme; I will say,
+      merely, that as the saloons are on Sixth Avenue, so the tearooms are in
+      every part of the island.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+    </p>
+    <div class="fig" style="width:50%;">
+      <img src="images/{0272}.jpg" alt="{0272}" width="100%" /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h5>
+      <a href="images/{0272}.jpg"> <img src="images/enlarge.jpg" alt="" /> </a>
+    </h5>
+    <h3>
+      XVIII
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      It had seemed to me in former visits to England that the Christian Sabbath
+      was a more depressing day there than here, but from the last I have a more
+      cheerful memory of it. I still felt it dispiriting in London, where as
+      many fled from it as could, and where the empty streets symbolized a world
+      abandoned to destruction; but this was mainly in the forenoon. Even then,
+      the markets and fairs in the avenues given up to them were the scenes of
+      an activity which was not without gayety, and certainly not without noise;
+      and when the afternoon came, the lower classes, such as had remained in
+      town, thronged to the public houses, and the upper classes to the evening
+      parade in the Park. As to the relative amount of church-going, I will not
+      even assume to be sure; but I have a fancy that it is a rite much less
+      rigorous than it used to be. Still, in provincial places, I found the
+      churches full on a Sunday morning, and all who could afford it hallowed
+      the day by putting on a frock-coat and a top-hat, which are not worn
+      outside of London on week-days. The women, of course, were always in their
+      best on Sunday. Perhaps in the very country the upper classes go to church
+      as much as formerly, but I have my doubts whether they feel so much
+      obliged to it in conformity to usage, or for the sake of example to their
+      inferiors. Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there
+      are pretty well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive
+      spectacle, and one could imagine people resorting to its functions for
+      aesthetic reasons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But, in these guesses, one must remember that the English who remained at
+      home were never Puritanized, never in such measure personally conscienced,
+      as those who came to America in the times of the successive Protestant
+      fervors; and that is a thing which we are apt to forget. The home-keeping
+      English continued, with changes of ritual, much like the peoples who still
+      acknowledged as their head &ldquo;the Bishop of Rome.&rdquo; Their greater
+      morality, if it was greater, was temperamental rather than spiritual, and,
+      leaving the church to look after religion much more than our Puritans did,
+      they kept a simplicity of nature impossible to the sectaries always taking
+      stock of their souls. In fact, the Calvinists of New England were almost
+      essentially different from the Calvinists of Holland, of France, even of
+      Scotland. If our ancestors were the children of light, as they trusted,
+      they were darkened by the forest, into which they plunged, to certain
+      reasons which the children of darkness, as the Puritans believed the
+      non-Puritans to be, saw by the uncertain glimmers from the world about
+      them. There is no denying that with certain great gains, the American
+      Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincialized, and that if they
+      lived in the spirit, they lived in it narrowly, while the others, who
+      lived in the body, lived in it liberally, or at any rate handsomely. From
+      our narrowness we flattered ourselves that we were able to imagine a life
+      more broadly based than theirs, or at least a life from which theirs must
+      look insufficient and unfinal, so long as man feels within himself the
+      prompting to be something better or higher than he is. Yet the English
+      life is wonderfully perfected. With a faery dream of a king supported in
+      his preeminence by a nobility, a nobility supported in turn by a
+      commonalty, a commonalty supported again by a proletariat resting upon
+      immeasurable ether; with a system of government kept, by assent so general
+      that the dissent does not matter, in the hands of a few families reared,
+      if not trained, to power; with a society so intimately and thoroughly
+      self-acquainted that one touch of gossip makes its whole world kin, and
+      responsive to a single emotion; with a charity so wisely studied, and so
+      carefully applied, that restive misery never quite grows rebellious; with
+      a patriotism so inborn and ingrained that all things English seem
+      righteous because English; with a willingness to share the general
+      well-being quite to the verge, but never beyond the verge, of public
+      control of the administration&mdash;with all this, the thing must strike
+      the unbelieving observer as desperately perfect. &ldquo;They have got it
+      down cold,&rdquo; he must say to himself, and confirm himself in his
+      unfaith by reflecting that it is very cold.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      XIX
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      The best observer of England that ever was, he whose book about the
+      English makes all other comment seem idle and superfluous palaver, that
+      Ralph Waldo Emerson whom we always find ahead of us when we look back for
+      him, was once, as he relates in a closing chapter of English Traits,
+      brought to bay by certain great English friends of his, who challenged him
+      to say whether there really were any Americans with an American idea, and
+      a theory of our future. &ldquo;Thus challenged, I bethought myself neither
+      of Congress, neither of President nor of Cabinet Ministers, nor of such as
+      would make of America another Europe.... I opened the dogma of
+      no-government and non-resistance, and anticipated the objections and the
+      fun, and procured a kind of hearing for it. I said, It is true that I have
+      never yet seen in any country a man of sufficient valor to stand for this
+      truth, and yet ... &lsquo;tis certain, as God liveth, the gun that does
+      not need another gun, the law of love and justice alone, can effect a
+      clean revolution.... I insisted ... that the manifest absurdity of the
+      view to English feasibility could make no difference to a gentleman; that
+      as to our secure tenure of our mutton-chop and spinach in London or in
+      Boston, the soul might quote Talleyrand, &lsquo;<i>Messieurs, je n&rsquo;en
+      vois pas la nécessité</i>.&rsquo;&rdquo; In other words, Emerson laid
+      before his great English friends a programme, as nearly as might then be,
+      of philosophical anarchism, and naturally it met with no more acceptance
+      than it would if now presented to the most respectable of his American
+      readers. Yet it is never to be forgotten that it was the English who, with
+      all their weight of feudal tradition, and amidst the nightmares to which
+      their faery dream seemed so long subject, invented the only form of
+      Democratic Christianity the world has yet known, unless indeed the German
+      Mennonites are the same as the earlier English Quakers were in creed and
+      life. In the pseudo-republic of the Cromwellian commonwealth the English
+      had a state as wholly without liberty, equality, and fraternity as in the
+      king-capped oligarchy they had before and have had ever since. We may be
+      sure that they will never have such another commonwealth, or any
+      resembling ours, which can no longer offer itself as an eminent example.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The sort of Englishmen, of whose respect Americans can make surest are
+      those English thick-and-thin patriots who admire force and strength, and
+      believe that it is the Anglo-Saxon mission to possess the earth, and to
+      profit by its weaker peoples, not cruelly, not unkindly, yet
+      unquestionably. The Englishmen of whose disrespect we can make surest are
+      those who expect to achieve liberty, equality, and fraternity in the
+      economic way, the political way having failed; who do not care whether the
+      head of the state is born or elected, is called &ldquo;King&rdquo; or
+      called &ldquo;President,&rdquo; since he will presently not be at all; who
+      abhor war, and believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and these
+      only if they work for a living. They have already had their will with the
+      existing English state, until now that state is far more the servant of
+      the people in fetching and carrying, in guarding them from hard masters
+      and succoring them in their need, than the republic which professes to
+      derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. When one
+      encounters this sort of Englishman, one thinks silently of the child labor
+      in the South, of the monopolies in the North, of the companies which
+      govern while they serve us, and one hopes that the Englishman is not
+      silently thinking of them too. He is probably of the lower classes, and
+      one consoles one&rsquo;s self as one can by holding one&rsquo;s head
+      higher in better company, where, without secret self-contempt, one can be
+      more openly proud of our increasing fortunes and our increasing territory,
+      and our warlike adequacy to a first position among the nations of the
+      world. There is no fear that in such company one&rsquo;s national
+      susceptibilities will be wounded, or that one will not be almost as much
+      admired for one&rsquo;s money as at home. I do not say quite, because
+      there are still things in England even more admired than money. Certainly
+      a very rich American would be considered in such English society, but
+      certainly he would not be so much considered as an equally rich Englishman
+      who was also a duke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      I cannot name a nobleman of less rank, because I will not belittle my rich
+      countryman, but perhaps the English would think differently, and would
+      look upon him as lower than the latest peer or the newest knight of the
+      King&rsquo;s creation. The King, who has no power, can do almost anything
+      in England; and his touch, which is no longer sovereign for scrofula, can
+      add dignity and give absolute standing to a man whose achievements merit
+      it, but who with us would fail of anything like it. The English system is
+      more logical than ours, but not so reasonable. The English have seen from
+      the beginning inequality and the rule of the few. We can hardly prove that
+      we see, in the future, equality and the rule of the many. Yet our vision
+      is doubtless prophetic, whatever obliquities our frequent astigmatism may
+      impart to it. Meantime, in its ampler range there is room for the play of
+      any misgiving short of denial; but the English cannot doubt the justice of
+      what they have seen without forming an eccentric relation to the actual
+      fact. The Englishman who refuses the formal recognition of his distinction
+      by his prince is the anomaly, not the Englishman who accepts it. Gladstone
+      who declines a peerage is anomalous, not Tennyson who takes it. As part of
+      the English system, as a true believer in the oligarchically administered
+      monarchy, Gladstone was illogical, and Tennyson was logical.
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      THE END
+    </h3>
+    <div style="height: 6em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
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