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CHAPTER VIII

My First Visit to England — Chester Cathedral — Sunshine in London — Westminster Abbey and the British Museum — English Art — At the English Dinner table — Our American Hospitality an Inherited Virtue — Oxford, Kenilworth, and Stratford-on-Avon — The English Attitude towards America.

In 1869 I went to England for the first time. I had no mission, political, religious, or literary. I represented nobody but myself. When I found the English people kind, courtly, well-bred, and especially polite on the ground that we were Americans, I could not but be won. "Remember, you are taking the reflex wave of the war," said one of my friends, who was not so much fascinated as I was. No matter what I took, it was very good, and " mine own."

"We went for the delicious purposes of travel. We wished to realize the reading of a lifetime; to see the Tower and Westminister Abbey and Eastcheap; to hear Bow Bells; to see the Queen; to look at Madame Tussaud's waxworks. Nothing was too low or too lofty for our omnivorous appetites. One of us had travelled before, but the other had not. But we both enjoyed alike her hedgerows, her golden pheasants trooping through the grass, her deer hiding in the ferns, her magnificent old oaks, her lordly residences, and her rose-embowered cottages. It was a gracious June day, a red-letter day in my humble annals, when we found ourselves sailing up the Mersey.