The Project Gutenberg EBook of Seven English Cities, by W. D. Howells
#58 in our series by W. D. Howells

Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.

This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file.  Please do not remove it.  Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.

Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file.  Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in
how the file may be used.  You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.


**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**

**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**

*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****


Title: Seven English Cities

Author: W. D. Howells

Release Date: December, 2004 [EBook #7187]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on March 24, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-Latin-1

*** START OF THE 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


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 book-
stores 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 court-
yard, 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 dcollete, 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 "_gele_," 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 tea-
rooms 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 ncessit_.'" 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 the Project Gutenberg EBook of Seven English Cities, by W. D. Howells

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES ***

This file should be named 8sevn10.txt or 8sevn10.zip
Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, 8sevn11.txt
VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, 8sevn10a.txt

Produced by Tricia Gilbert, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US
unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we usually do not
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.

We are now trying to release all our eBooks one year in advance
of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing.
Please be encouraged to tell us about any error or corrections,
even years after the official publication date.

Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til
midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement.
The official release date of all Project Gutenberg eBooks is at
Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month.  A
preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment
and editing by those who wish to do so.

Most people start at our Web sites at:
http://gutenberg.net or
http://promo.net/pg

These Web sites include award-winning information about Project
Gutenberg, including how to donate, how to help produce our new
eBooks, and how to subscribe to our email newsletter (free!).


Those of you who want to download any eBook before announcement
can get to them as follows, and just download by date.  This is
also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the
indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an
announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter.

http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 or
ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03

Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90

Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want,
as it appears in our Newsletters.


Information about Project Gutenberg (one page)

We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work.  The
time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours
to get any eBook selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright
searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc.   Our
projected audience is one hundred million readers.  If the value
per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2
million dollars per hour in 2002 as we release over 100 new text
files per month:  1240 more eBooks in 2001 for a total of 4000+
We are already on our way to trying for 2000 more eBooks in 2002
If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total
will reach over half a trillion eBooks given away by year's end.

The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away 1 Trillion eBooks!
This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers,
which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users.

Here is the briefest record of our progress (* means estimated):

eBooks Year Month

    1  1971 July
   10  1991 January
  100  1994 January
 1000  1997 August
 1500  1998 October
 2000  1999 December
 2500  2000 December
 3000  2001 November
 4000  2001 October/November
 6000  2002 December*
 9000  2003 November*
10000  2004 January*


The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created
to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium.

We need your donations more than ever!

As of February, 2002, contributions are being solicited from people
and organizations in: Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut,
Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Illinois,
Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Massachusetts,
Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New
Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Ohio,
Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South
Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West
Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

We have filed in all 50 states now, but these are the only ones
that have responded.

As the requirements for other states are met, additions to this list
will be made and fund raising will begin in the additional states.
Please feel free to ask to check the status of your state.

In answer to various questions we have received on this:

We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork to legally
request donations in all 50 states.  If your state is not listed and
you would like to know if we have added it since the list you have,
just ask.

While we cannot solicit donations from people in states where we are
not yet registered, we know of no prohibition against accepting
donations from donors in these states who approach us with an offer to
donate.

International donations are accepted, but we don't know ANYTHING about
how to make them tax-deductible, or even if they CAN be made
deductible, and don't have the staff to handle it even if there are
ways.

Donations by check or money order may be sent to:

Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
PMB 113
1739 University Ave.
Oxford, MS 38655-4109

Contact us if you want to arrange for a wire transfer or payment
method other than by check or money order.

The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been approved by
the US Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) organization with EIN
[Employee Identification Number] 64-622154.  Donations are
tax-deductible to the maximum extent permitted by law.  As fund-raising
requirements for other states are met, additions to this list will be
made and fund-raising will begin in the additional states.

We need your donations more than ever!

You can get up to date donation information online at:

http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html


***

If you can't reach Project Gutenberg,
you can always email directly to:

Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com>

Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message.

We would prefer to send you information by email.


**The Legal Small Print**


(Three Pages)

***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS**START***
Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers.
They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with
your copy of this eBook, even if you got it for free from
someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our
fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement
disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how
you may distribute copies of this eBook if you want to.

*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS EBOOK
By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm
eBook, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept
this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive
a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this eBook by
sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person
you got it from. If you received this eBook on a physical
medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request.

ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM EBOOKS
This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBooks,
is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart
through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project").
Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright
on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and
distribute it in the United States without permission and
without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth
below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this eBook
under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark.

Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market
any commercial products without permission.

To create these eBooks, the Project expends considerable
efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain
works. Despite these efforts, the Project's eBooks and any
medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other
things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other
intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged
disk or other eBook medium, a computer virus, or computer
codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment.

LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES
But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below,
[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may
receive this eBook from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm eBook) disclaims
all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including
legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR
UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT,
INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE
OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE
POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

If you discover a Defect in this eBook within 90 days of
receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any)
you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that
time to the person you received it from. If you received it
on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and
such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement
copy. If you received it electronically, such person may
choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to
receive it electronically.

THIS EBOOK IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS
TO THE EBOOK OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT
LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A
PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or
the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the
above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you
may have other legal rights.

INDEMNITY
You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation,
and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated
with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm
texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including
legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the
following that you do or cause:  [1] distribution of this eBook,
[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the eBook,
or [3] any Defect.

DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm"
You may distribute copies of this eBook electronically, or by
disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this
"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg,
or:

[1]  Only give exact copies of it.  Among other things, this
     requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the
     eBook or this "small print!" statement.  You may however,
     if you wish, distribute this eBook in machine readable
     binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form,
     including any form resulting from conversion by word
     processing or hypertext software, but only so long as
     *EITHER*:

     [*]  The eBook, when displayed, is clearly readable, and
          does *not* contain characters other than those
          intended by the author of the work, although tilde
          (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may
          be used to convey punctuation intended by the
          author, and additional characters may be used to
          indicate hypertext links; OR

     [*]  The eBook may be readily converted by the reader at
          no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent
          form by the program that displays the eBook (as is
          the case, for instance, with most word processors);
          OR

     [*]  You provide, or agree to also provide on request at
          no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the
          eBook in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC
          or other equivalent proprietary form).

[2]  Honor the eBook refund and replacement provisions of this
     "Small Print!" statement.

[3]  Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the
     gross profits you derive calculated using the method you
     already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  If you
     don't derive profits, no royalty is due.  Royalties are
     payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation"
     the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were
     legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent
     periodic) tax return.  Please contact us beforehand to
     let us know your plans and to work out the details.

WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO?
Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of
public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed
in machine readable form.

The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time,
public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses.
Money should be paid to the:
"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."

If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or
software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at:
hart@pobox.com

[Portions of this eBook's header and trailer may be reprinted only
when distributed free of all fees.  Copyright (C) 2001, 2002 by
Michael S. Hart.  Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be
used in any sales of Project Gutenberg eBooks or other materials be
they hardware or software or any other related product without
express permission.]

*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN EBOOKS*Ver.02/11/02*END*

