of England, toward London, I thought my eyes would never get their fill of the landscape, and that I would lose them out of my head by their eagerness to catch every object as we rushed along! How they reveled, how they followed the birds and the game, how they glanced ahead on the track-that marvelous track!—or shot off over the fields and downs finding their delight in the streams, the roads, the bridges, the splendid breeds of cattle and sheep in the fields, the superb husbandry, the rich mellow soil, the drainage, the hedges-in the inconspicuousness of any given feature and the mellow tone and homely sincerity of all; now dwelling fondly upon the groups of neatly modeled stacks, then upon the field occupations, the gathering of turnips and cabbages, or the digging of potatoes, -how I longed to turn up the historic soil into which had passed the sweat and virtue of so many generations, with my own spade, then upon the quaint, old thatched houses, or the cluster of tiled roofs, then catching at a church spire across a meadow (and it is all meadow) or at the remains of tower or wall overrun with ivy !

Here, something almost human looks out at you from the landscape nature; here has been so long under the dominion of man, has been taken up and lain down by him so many times, worked over and over with his hands, fed and fattened by his toil and industry, and on the whole, has proved herself so willing and tractable, that she has taken on something of his image, and seems to radiate his presence. She is completely domesticated, and no doubt loves the titivation of the harrow and plow. The fields look half conscious, and if ever the cattle have "great and tranquil thoughts," as Emerson suggests they do, it must be when lying upon these lawns and meadows. I noticed that the trees, the oaks and elms, looked like fruit trees, or as if they had felt the humanizing influences of so many generations of men, and were betaking themselves from the woods to the orchard. The game is more than half tame, and one could easily understand that it had a keeper.

But the look of those fields and parks went straight to my heart. It is not merely that they were so smooth and cultivated, but that they were so benign and maternal, so redolent of cattle and sheep and of patient, homely, farm labor. One gets only here and there a glimpse of such in

this country. I see occasionally about our farms a patch of an acre or half acre upon which has settled this atmosphere of ripe and loving husbandry; a choice bit of meadow about the barn or orchard, or near the house, which has had some special fattening, perhaps been the site of some former garden or barn, or homestead, or which has had the wash of some building, where the feet of children have played for generations, and the flocks and herds been fed in winter, and where they love to lie and ruminate at night-a piece of sward thick and smooth, and full of warmth and nutriment, where the grass is greenest and freshest in spring, and the hay finest and thickest in summer.

This is the character of the whole of England that I saw. I had been told I should see a garden, but I did not know before to what extent the earth could become a living repository of the virtues of so many generations of gardeners. The tendency to run to weeds and wild growths seems to have been utterly eradicated from the soil, and if anything were to spring up spontaneously, I think it would be cabbage and turnips, or grass and grain.

And yet, to American eyes, the country seems quite uninhabited, there are so few dwellings, and so few people. Such a landscape at home would be dotted all over with thrifty farm-houses, each with its group of painted out-buildings, and along every road and highway would be seen the well-to-do turnouts of the independent free-holders. But in England the dwellings of the poor people, the farmers, are so humble and inconspicuous and are really so far apart, and the halls and the country-seats of the aristocracy are SO hidden in the midst of vast estates, that the landscape seems almost deserted, and it is not till you see the towns and great cities that you can understand where so vast a population keeps itself.

Another thing that would be quite sure to strike my eye on this my first ride across British soil and on all subsequent rides, was the enormous number of birds and fowls of various kinds that swarmed in the air or covered the ground. It was truly amazing. It seemed as if the feath| ered life of a whole continent must have been concentrated upon this island. Indeed, I doubt if a sweeping together of all the birds of the United States into any two of the largest States, would people the earth and air more fully. There appeared

to be a plover, a crow, a rook, a blackbird and a sparrow, to every square yard of ground. They know the value of birds in Britain-that they are the friends, not the enemies, of the farmer. It must be the paradise of crows and rooks. It did me good to see them so much at home about the fields and even in the towns. I was glad also to see that the British crow was not a stranger to me, and that he differed from his brother on the American side of the Atlantic only in being less alert and cautious, having less use for these qualities.

Now and then the train would start up some more tempting game. A brace or two of partridges or a covey of quails would settle down in the stubble, or a cock pheasant drop head and tail and slide into the copse. Rabbits also would scamper back from the borders of the fields into the thickets or peep slyly out. making my sportsman's fingers tingle.

I have no doubt I should be a notorious poacher in England. How could an American see so much game and not wish to exterminate it entirely as he does at home? But sporting is an expensive luxury here. In the first place a man pays a heavy tax on his gun, nearly or quite half its value; then he has to have a license to hunt, for which he pays smartly, then permission from the owner of the land upon which he wishes to hunt, so that the game is hedged about by a triple safeguard.

An American also, will be at once struck with the look of greater substantiality and completeness in everything he sees here. No temporizing, no make-shifts, no evidence of hurry, or failure, or contract work; no wood and little paint, but plenty of iron and brick and stone. This people have taken plenty of time, and have built broad and deep, and placed the cap-stone on. All this I had been told, but it pleased me so in the seeing that I must tell it again. It is worth a voyage across the Atlantic to see the bridges alone. I believe I had seen little other than wooden bridges before, and in England I saw not one such, but everywhere solid arches of masonry, that were refreshing and reassuring to behold. Even the lanes and by-ways about the farm, I noticed, crossed the little creeks with a span upon which an elephant would not hesitate to tread, or artillery trains to pass. There is no form so pleasing to look upon as the arch, or that affords so

much food and suggestion to the mind. It seems to stimulate the volition, the willpower, and for my part, I cannot look upon a noble span without a feeling of envy, for I know the hearts of heroes are thus keyed and fortified. The arch is the symbol of strength and activity, and of rectitude, and if I were a despot I would keep it in all possible ways constantly before my people. Not a window or doorway but should be arched, and my bows of granite should span every stream and river in the land. I would erect triumphal arches over all the streets, and build halls and edifices of the purest Gothic architecture, that so I might correct the manners and physiognomies of the people, and woo this type back again to the human brow, whence it so long ago fled.

In Europe I took a new lease of this feeling, this partiality for the span, and had daily opportunities to indulge and confirm it.

In London I had immense satisfaction in observing the bridges there and in walking over them, firm as the geological strata, and as enduring. London Bridge, Waterloo Bridge, Blackfriars, etc., clearing the river in a few gigantic leaps, like things of life and motion-to pass over one of these bridges or to sail under it awakens the emotion of the sublime. I think the moral value of such a bridge as the Waterloo must be inestimable. It seems to me the British Empire itself is stronger for such a bridge, and that all public and private virtues are stronger. In Paris too, those superb monuments over the Seine-I think they alone ought to inspire the citizens with a love of permanence, and help hold them to stricter notions of law and dependence. No doubt kings and tyrants know the value of these things, and as yet they certainly have the monopoly of them.

LONDON.

I am too good a countryman to feel much at home in cities, and usually value them only as conveniences, but for London I conceived quite an affection; perhaps because it is so much like a natural formation itself, and strikes less loudly upon the senses than our great cities do. It is a forest of brick and stone of the most stupendous dimensions, and one traverses it in the same adventurous kind of way that he does woods and mountains. maze and tangle of streets is something fearful, and any generalization of them a

The

step not to be hastily taken. My experience heretofore had been that cities generally were fractions that could be greatly reduced, but London I found I could not simplify, and every morning for weeks, when I came out of my hotel, it was a question whether my course lay in this direction or in squarely the opposite. It has no unit of structure, but is a vast aggregation of streets and houses, or in fact of towns and cities, which have to be mastered in detail. I tried the third or fourth day to get a bird's eye view from the top of St. Paul's, but saw through the rifts in the smoke only a waste-literally a waste of red tiles and chimney pots. The confusion and desolation were complete.

But I finally mastered the city, in a measure, by the aid of a shilling map which I carried with me wherever I went, and upon which when I was lost I would hunt myself up, thus making in the end a very suggestive and entertaining map. Indeed every inch of this piece of colored paper is alive to me. If I did not make the map itself, I at least verified it, which is nearly as good, and the verification, on street corner by day, and under lamp or by shop window at night, was often a matter of so much concern that I doubt if the original surveyor himself put more heart into certain parts of his work than I did in the proof of them.

My visit fell at a most favorable juncture as to weather, there being but few rainy days and but little fog. I had imagined that they had barely enough fair weather in London, at any season, to keep alive the tradition of sunshine and of blue sky, but the October days I spent there were not so very far behind what we have at home at this season. London often puts on a night-cap of smoke and fog, which it pulls down over its ears pretty close at times, and the sun has a habit of lying abed very late in the morning, which all the people imitate; but I remember some very pleasant weather there, and some bright moonlight nights.

I saw but one full-blown, characteristic London fog. I was in the National Gallery one day, trying to make up my mind about Turner, when this chimney-pot meteor came down. It was like a great yellow dog taking possession of the world. The light faded from the room, the pictures ran together in confused masses of shadow on the walls, and in the street only a dim yellowish twilight prevailed, through

It

which faintly twinkled the lights in the shop windows. Vehicles came slowly out of the dirty obscurity on one side and plunged into it on the other. Waterloo Bridge gave one or two leaps and disappeared, and the Nelson Column in Trafalgar square was obliterated for half its length. Travel was impeded, boats stopped on the river, trains stood still on the track and for an hour and a half London lay buried beneath this sickening eruption. I say eruption, because a London fog is only a London smoke, tempered by a moist atmosphere. It is called "fog" by courtesy, but lampblack is its chief ingredient. is not wet like our fogs, but quite dry, and makes the eyes smart and the nose tingle. Whenever the sun can be seen through it, his face is red and dirty; seen through a bona fide fog his face is clean and white. English coal,-or "coals" as they say here,―in burning gives out an enormous quantity of thick, yellowish smoke, which is at no time absorbed or dissipated as it would be in our hard, dry atmosphere, and which at certain times is not absorbed at all, but falls down swollen and augmented by the prevailing moisture. The atmosphere of the whole island is more or less impregnated with smoke, even on the fairest days, and it becomes more and more dense as you approach the great towns. Yet this compound of smut, fog and common air is an elixir of youth; and this is one of the surprises of London, to see amid so much soot and dinginess such fresh, blooming complexions and in general such a fine physical tone and full-bloodedness among the people-such as one has come to associate only with the best air and the purest, wholesomest country influences. What the secret of it may be, I am at a loss to know, unless it is that the moist atmosphere does not dry up the blood as our air does, and that the carbon and creosote have some rare antiseptic and preservative qualities, as doubtless they have, that are efficacious in the human physiology. It is no doubt true, also, that people do not tan in this climate, as in ours, and that the delicate flesh tints show more on that account.

I speak thus of these things with reference to our standards at home, because I found that these standards were ever present in my mind, and that I was unconsciously applying them to whatever I saw, and wherever I went, and often, as I shall have occasion to show, to their discredit.

Climate is a great matter, and no doubt many of the differences between the English stock at home and its offshoot in our country, are traceable to this source. Our climate is more heady and less stomachic than the English; sharpens the wit, but dries up the fluids and viscera; favors an irregular, nervous energy, but exhausts the animal spirits. It is, perhaps, on this account that I have felt since my return how much easier it is to be a dyspeptic here than in Great Britain. One's appetite is keener and more ravenous, and the temptation to bolt one's food greater. The American is not so hearty an eater as the Englishman, but the forces of his body are constantly leaving his stomach in the lurch, and running off into his hands and feet and head. His eyes are bigger than his belly, but an Englishman's belly is a deal larger than his eyes, and the number of plum puddings and amount of Welsh rare-bit he devours annually would send the best of us to his grave in half that time. We have not enough constitutional inertia and stolidity; our climate gives us no rest, but goads us day and night, and the consequent wear and tear of life is no doubt greater in this country than in any other on the globe. We are playing the game more rapidly, but no doubt less thoroughly and sincerely than the mother country.

in following the whims of that famous courtesan have the most fickle and destructive climate to contend with.

English women all have good-sized feet, and English men, too, and wear large, comfortable shoes. This was a noticeable feature at once; coarse, loose-fitting clothes of both sexes, and large boots and shoes with low heels. They evidently knew the use of their feet, and had none of the French, or American, or Chinese fastidiousness about this part of their anatomy. I notice that when a family begins to run out, it turns out its toes, drops off at the heel, shortens its jaw, and dotes on small feet and hands.

Another promoter of health in England. is woolen clothes, which are worn the year round, the summer driving people into no such extremities as here. And the good, honest woolen stuffs of one kind and another that fill the shops, attest the need and the taste that prevails. They had a garment when I was in London called the Ulster overcoat-a coarse, shaggy, bungling coat, with a skirt reaching nearly to the feet, very ugly, tried by the fashion plates, but very comfortable, and quite the fashion. This very sensible garment has since become well known in America.

The Americans in London were put out with the tailors, and could rarely get suited, on account of the loose cutting and the want of" style." But "style" is the hiatus that threatens to swallow us all one of these days. About the only monstrosity I saw in the British man's dress was the stove-pipe hat, which everybody wears. At first I feared it might be a police regulation or a requirement of the British constitution, for I seemed to be about the only man in the kingdom with a soft hat on, and I had noticed that before leaving the steamer every man brought out from its hiding-place one of these polished brain

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A watch will not keep as steady time here as in Britain and the human clockwork is more liable to get out of repair for the same reason. Our women, especially, break down prematurely, and the decay of maternity in this country is no doubt greater than in any of the oldest civilized communities. One reason, doubtless, is that our women are the greatest slaves of fashion in the whole world, and

Even the boys wear themyouths of nine and ten years with little stove-pipe hats on; and at Eton School I saw black swarms of them-even the boys in the field were playing foot-ball in stove-pipe hats.

What we call beauty in woman is so much a matter of youth and health that the average of female beauty in London is, no doubt, higher than in this country. English women are comely and good-looking. It is an extremely fresh and pleasant face that you see, though, as some Frenchman has