C^atnell Uniuetaitg Siihrarg 3tl)aca, Ncm Qarh BOUGHT WITH THE [NCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028009136 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES [See parre 5'i A Vlinv 01-- MOXK JUU SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES AND AS MANY WATERING-PLACES BY W. D. HOWELLS ILLUSTRATED HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON 1914 /V.4tiic^4- BooKS BY W. D. HOWELLS Aonie Kilbum 12mo SI. 50 April Hopes 12mo 1.50 Between the Dark and Day- light. New Edition 12mo 1.50 Boy Life. lU'd 12mo net 50 Boy's Town. IIl'd..Post 8vo 1.25 Certain Delightful English Towns. Ill'd 8vo ne« 3.00 Traveller's Ed., Leather net 3.00 Christmas Every Day, and Other Stories. Dl'd. .12mo 1.25 Holiday Edition. lU'd. .4to 1.75 Coast of Bohemia. 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Ill'd 32mo .50 HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1911, 1 912, BY H ABPER ft BROTHERS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA CONTENTS FAOG A Modest Liking foe Liverpool 3 Some Merits of Manchester 15 In Smokiest Sheffield 27 Nine Days' Wonder in York 41 Two Yorkish Episodes 69 A Day at Doncaster and an Hour Out of Durham . . 80 The Mother of the American Athens 97 Aberystwyth, a Welsh Watehing-placb 121 Llandudno, another Welsh Watering-place .... 139 Glimpses op English Character 159 The Human Interest op Buxton 205 Some Last Drops in Tunbridge Wells 223 The City of the Royal Pavilion 243 The Waters op Blackpool 259 Experiences op a True Baconian in Shakespeare's Town 275 A Pair op Pageants 289 ILLUSTRATIONS A VIEW OP MONK BAR ... Frontispiece ST. GEOBGE's hall, LIVEEPOOL Facing p. 4 THE WELLINGTON MONUMENT, LIVERPOOL " 8 THE LIVERPOOL DOCKS " 10 MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL ... " 16 TOWN HALL, MANCHESTER . . " 20 THE MANCHESTER SHIP-CANAL . . ... . " 22 TOWN HALL, SHEFFIELD " 34 YORK MINSTER — THE GRANDEST IN ALL ENGLAND . . " 44 BOOTH AM BAR AND THE MINSTER ... . "52 WALMGATE BAR HAS A BARBICAN ... . . " 56 BT. mart's abbey . " 60 Clifford's tower . . ..." 64 york as seen from the river . " 74 durham cathedral northwest view " 82 finchale priory " 86 durham cathedral its matchless seat on the bluffs op the river ... " 92 THE "stump" OP ST. BOTOLPH's CHURCH AGAINST THE SKY " 98 THE WORTHY ANCESTRESS OP FANEUIL HALL AND QUINCY MARKET-PLACES " 100 THE RIVER AT EVENING " 102 "lifting ITS TOWER FROM THE BRINK OP THE WITHAM" " 106 FISHING-SHIPS AT GREAT GRIMSBY " 116 THE BEACH, ABERYSTWYTH " 124 ABERYSTWYTH FROM GRAIG GLAS ROCKS ,.,,., " 130 ILLCSTEATIONS LLANDUDNO — THE CITY AND HARBOE Facing p. 140 LLANDUDNO FROM GREAT ORME'S NECK " 144 THE GREAT PIER, LLANDUDNO . " 148 CONWAY CASTLE " 152 PLAS MAWR " 154 A PRESENTATION AT COURT " 162 THE ENGLISH HOUSEMAID " 190 "LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS" .... " 194 A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL SEYEN ENGLISH CITIES A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVERPOOL Why sliould the proud stomacli of American travel, miieh 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 land- ing, 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 edi- fice, but every now and then it reverts to it, and re- minds the traveller that he is in a great modem me- tropolis of commerce by many other noble edifices. 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 unambitious- ly calls its elevated road) ; but then, as I noted in my account of Southampton, docks have a fancy of taking themselves in, and eltiding the tourist eye, and even when 3 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 per- functory 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 pur countrywomen 4 • A MODEST LIKING TOE LIVEKPOOL 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 of- ficial or servile attendance. " Let me stay here," one of them entreated, " because there's such a draught at the other window. Hay 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. 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 con- nationals away as rapidly as they could. Many fa- miliar accents remained till the morning, and the break- fast-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 utter- most 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 evi- dently flourished the more it plainly languished. I found no pleasure in the paradox, and I was not over- joyed by the inevitable ugliness of the brick villas of the suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed. 5 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES But then, after divers tram changes, came the consola- tion of beautiful riverside beaches, thronged with peo- ple who looked gay at that distance, and beyond the Hersey rose the Welsh hills, blue, blue. Ill 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 hos- pitality 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 Pinker- ton Detective Agency, and had once been in Stratford- on-Avon; this doubly satisfied us as cultivated Amer- icans. 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 in- tersection 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 A MODEST LIKING FOE LIVEElPOOL 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 pict- ures. The pictures might have been better, but then they might have been worse (there being examples of rilippo liippi, Memmi, Holbein, and, above all, the Dante's Dream of Eossetti) ; 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 non- conformist, 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 vsdth a fellow-foreigner of seafaring complexion who addressed me in an accent so unlike my own Amer- ican that I ventured to answer him in Italian. Ho was indeed a Genoese, who had spent much time in Buenos Ayres and was presently thinking of Ifew York ; and we had some friendly discourse together concern- ing 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 7 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 eques- trian statue of the late Queen, who had no special mo- tive I could think of for being shown to her rightly loving subjects on horseback. We parted with the ex- pressed 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 con- jured 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 rever- ent visitors. I knew that Gladstone was bom at Liver- 8 A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVEEPOOL pool, but not Mrs. Oliphant, and the only literary shade I could summon from a past vague enough to my igno- rance was William Eoscoe, 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 Kupert 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. 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 me- tropolis of our own. Even in journalism, an intensely modem product, it does not excel; Manchester has its able and well-written Guardian, but what has Liver- pool ? 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 ia 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 in- vulnerable 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 9 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES permanently, but consecutively. Every Cunarder, every White Star, pours out upon a city abandoned by its own good society a flood of cultivated Americans, v^ho 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 Cus- toms 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 Liver- pool, 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 Eng- lish tovsTis is that they are without any social conscious- ness. 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 ener- gies rage round them in a gigantic maturity. The time was when Liverpool was practically the sole port of entry for our human cargoes, indentured ap- prentices of the beautiful, the historical. With the almost immediate transference of the original trans- atlantic steamship interests from Bristol, Liverpool be- came the only place where you could arrive. Amer- ican lines, long erased from the seas, and the Inman line, the Cunard line, the White Star line, and the 10 » •V O g a c A MODEST LIKING FOR LIVEKPOOL rest, would land you nowhere else. Then heretical steamers began to land you at Glasgow; worse schis- matics carried you to Southampton ; there were hetero- dox 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 rail- road 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 pas- senger'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. I have tried to give some notion of the fond be- havior 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 effective- ly parts of the great hotels, and whir away to Lon- don 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 suc- cessive trains carry into the heart of the land every- where, these and their baggage, to which they continue attached by their very heart-strings, invisibly stretch- ing from their first-class corridor compartments to the different luggage-vans. I must say they have very ten- derly, very perfectly imagined us, all those hotel people and railroad folk, and fold us, anxious and bewildered n SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 your- self 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 ISTorthwestern, 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 SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER I wii.ii 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 su- preme 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 bet- ter 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 com- position 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 15 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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. 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 fur- nace 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 cathe- drals; 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 epis- copal see only some fifty years; before that the cathe- dral 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 16 SOME MEEITS OF MANCHESTER place in the open square before it. Call it an incon- gruity, if you will, but that enemy of episcopacy ia 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. With the constantly passing trams which traverse the square, he is undoubtedly more significant of mod- ern 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 Mar- seilles, and later passed under the yoke of Agricola and was a Roman military station, and got the name of Mgen-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 modem 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 17 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES that the end of August was not the beginning of Iso- vember. 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, un- usual in their number and variety, had a sympathetic allure in the gray, cool light, even to the spectator pass- ing 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 in- terested me more were the miles and miles of com- fortable-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, out- side 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 un- imagined 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 peo- ple who have greatly made the greatness of England 18 SOME MEEITS OF MANGHESTEE 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 Pitts- burg, or Chicago, or St. Louis, which, even from the literary attics of ISTew York, we should not exactly al- low ourselves to spit upon. Practically, I know noth- ing 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 uncom- monly 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. Ill 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 TJnitarianism which eventuated in that literature, I heard it had largely turned to epis- 19 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES copacy, 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 con- stitution that the great city from whose political fame these names are inseparable should have had no repre- sentation in Parliament from Cromwell's time to Vic- toria's. Fancy Akron, Ohio, or Grand Eapids, Michi- gan, without a member of Congress ! 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 my- self so extreme a laissez-faireist as to have thought of 20 O > o a H B SOME MEKITS OF MANCHESTEE 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 tol- erably M'ell-meaning world like this, any sort of con- tempt becomes inclusive, and a whole population suf- fers for the vice, or it may be the virtiie, of a very small majority, or a very powerful minority. Prob- ably the most liberal and intelligent populations of Great Britain are those of Manchester and Birming- ham, names which have stood for a hard and sordid industrialism, unrelieved by noble sympathies and im- pulses. It is quite possible that a less generoiis 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 phi- losophy which once wrapt a world of iiction 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 suf- ficed 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 21 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES cotton-mills in onr Lowell, and I was eager, if not will- ing, to contrast them with the mills of Manchester; but such of these as still remained there were, for my luckless mioment, 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 de- sired by the aesthetic visitor, and I had to come away without mine. I had to come away without that personal acquaint- ance with the great Manchester ship-canal which I al- most 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 col- ors and emblems equalled with those of Great Britain 22 SOME MERITS OF MANCHESTER 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 multi- tude 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 de- mons of that most dramatic representation of perdition. The merchants, alike staid, whether old or young, con- gregated 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 hmn, deepening ever, and never breaking into a shriek of torment or de- rision. It was not histrionic, and yet for its com- mercial importance it was one of the most moving spectacles which could offer itself to the eye in the whole world. 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 Ey- lands Library to the memory of a citizen of Man- chester. Books in a library, except you have time and free access to them, are as bafBtng 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 advfintage. I find, therefore, that my 23 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 medi- aeval 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 Man- chester for. IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD Ip I had waited a little till I had got into the heau- tiful Derbyshire country which lies, or rather rolls, be- tween Manchester and Sheffield, I could as easily have got rid of my epoch in the smiling agricultural land- scape. 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 Man- chester, 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 ef- fect. The English, with their love of brevity and sim- plicity, call these proud seats the Dukeries, but our affair was not with them, and I shall not be able to 27 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 preju- dices, was an experience which I would not have missed for many Dukeries. The kindly house was not so suf- focatingly 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 IsTew 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 28 IN Sj¥OKIEST SHEFFIELD evolved in yet. It was pleasant to look upon those different shades of color, from dead hlack to creamy blond, in their novel relief against an air of ungrudg- ing, 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, hut shrewd and well in hand, who, as the unmistakable manager, was, I hope, finally as well sat- isfied as the other spectators. II I myself came away entirely satisfied, indeed, but for the lasting pang I inflicted upon myself by deny- ing a penny to the ragged wretch who superfluously opened the valves of my hansom for me. My explana- tion 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 fur- ther it could not ? I advise the reader who finds him- self in the like case to give the sixpence, and if he cares for the peace of my conscience, to make it a shil- ling; 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; 29 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES and I perceived that wkerever business throve it seemed to be at the cost of somebody ; though even when busi- ness 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 v/ere 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 over- hanging 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. Slat- ternly 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 30 IN SMOKIEST SHErriELD 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 nay self, that I never did anything of the kind again as long as I remained in ShefSeld. I felt that I owed a duty to the place and must not go about corrupting the populace for my selfish pleasure. Ill Between our hotel and the main part of the town there yawned a black valley, rather nobly bridged, or viadueted, and beyond it in every direction the chim- neys 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 im- mediate cloud above the works; but it could not, and it ended by shutting the hole under it, and disappear- ing. 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 pocketbook I say that outside 31 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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. Mj guide proved a most decent, patient, and kind- ly 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 tbeir 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 32 IN SMOKIEST SHEPFIELD 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 tilled 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 ele- phants get scarcer; and that must have been why I paid as much for a penknife in the glittering show- room 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 sales- man 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 usiial English fashion, under the Britons and grew into municipal consciousness in the fostering care of the Ro- mans and the ruder nurture of the Saxons, Danes, and E'ormans. 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 33 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES all the region which did not mourn a loss. Which of the Roses Sheffield held for, White or Eed, 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 Shef- field 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. Apparent- ly it has been growing radical, as the centres of pros- perity 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 34 > IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD to their pacification, and now Shefiield takes its ad- versity almost as quietly as its prosperity. 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 see- ing 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 triiunphed. 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 de- testable 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 35 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 climb- ing 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 omv 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 bet- ter let the driver get down and knock, a farmer-like man came to the door and called the dog off. Then, in a rich l^orth 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 36 IN SMOKIEST SHEFFIELD stairs of the tower to the chambers where Mary mis- erably 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 re- lentless 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 itforfolk, 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 Mas- 37 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES sachusetts, 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 pro- vided, 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 ISTorman origin and modern restora- tion, 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 dust- lessness 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 NINE DAYS' WONDER IN YORK Pekhaps it would be better to come to York some- what 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 sun- shine 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 uncom- fortably warm, or at least you were wet. If the morn- ings demanded a fire in the grate, the evenings were so clement that the lamp was sufficient, and the noons were very well with neither. The day of our arrival in York began bright at Shef- field, where there was a man quarrelling so loudly and 41 SEVEN ENGLISI-I CITIES aimlessly in the station that we were glad to get away from him, as well as from the mountains of slag sur- rounding 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 Avheat 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 con- trary with nothing less than astonishment. The acre- age 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 re- turn 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 reck- oned 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 ex- pressed 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 42 NINE DAYS' WONDEE IN YOEK woman, but I privately asked the head porter what races those were which were limiting our proposed so- journ, and I am now afraid he had some difficulty in keeping a head porter's conventional respect for a for- mal 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 re- solved 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 grand- est 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 can- not 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 open- ings 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 per- spectives of some cathedrals; besides, the afternoon of 4 43 SEVEN ENGLISIi CITIES 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 re- minded how equally authoritative the Church of Eng- land and the Church of Eome were, and how little they adjust their ceremonial to the individual, how largely to the collective worshipper. You could come into the ]\'Iinster 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. 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 " scatter- ingly noble outside." By this I dare say I meant it had not that artistic unity of which I brought the im- pression from the inside. They were doing, as they were always doing, everywhere, with English cathedrals, 44 NINE DAYS' WONDER IN YORK something to one of the towers ; but this only enhanced its scattering nobleness, for it left that greatly bescaf- folded 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 im- mediately surrounding the church were the favorite sojourn, apparently, of such strangers as could have rooms at the hotels only until the Monday of Don- caster Week. Ill During those limited days of the week before Don- caster, I was constantly coming back to the Minster, which is not the germ of political York, or hardly re- ligious York; the brave city was a Eomano - British capital and a Eomano - 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 be- lieve 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 45 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 run- ning 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 clear- est 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 iN'orthumbrian 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 burn- ed, 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 46 NINE DAYS' WONDEE IN YOKK to be destroyed by that devout William the Conqueror, who came to take the Saxon world in its sins of gut- tling and guzzling. The first Norman archbishop re- constructed or restored the church, and then it began to rise and to spread in glory — nave, transepts, and choir, and pillars and towers, iSTorman and Early Eng- lish, and Perpendicular and Decorated — till it found itself at last what the American tourist sees it to-day. It suffered from two gTeat iires in the nineteenth cen- tury, 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 com- pensated 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 en- cased 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 of- fence of Protestant piety, he was heading a procession 47 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 stall 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. Eaine'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 siich 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 Per- pendicular Gothic carried the eye to the old gargoyles of the eaves 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 feel- ing 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 48 NINE DAYS' WONDEE IN YORK 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 suppli- cation 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 be- gun, 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 49 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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. Our railway hotel lay a little way out of the town, and after a day's sight-seeing we were to meet or min- gle 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 IN'ew 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 E^ew York. Eor 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 medi- eval gate through which the traveller passes in return- ing from the Elatiron Building to his hotel in the Grand Central Station. We do not begin to have such a hoar antiquity as 50 NINE DAYS' WONDEE IN YORK 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. AW underground York is doubtless fuller of Rome 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 Eome, but Christianity polit- ically began in York, as it has politically ended in ISTew 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 hos- pitably at home and is not merely an unwilling guest, as in our unmemoried land. Florence is very well, Venice is not so bad, ISTaples has her long thoughts, and Milan is mediseval-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 pres- ence 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 be- fore 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 51 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 win- dows 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 un- broken masses of foliage. All round your hotel spreads a gridiron of railroad, yet such is the force of the Eng- lish 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 Komans 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 dvie course still, the murdering and plundering and scorning ISTormans. But all so quietly, like the humming-bird-like expresses, with a kind of railway celerity in the foreshortened retro- spect ; and after the ISTormans have crushed themselves down into the mass of the A^anquished, and formed the English out of the blend, there follow the many wars of the successions, of the Eoses, 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, 62 5^^45^ y^ NINE DAYS' WONDEE IN YOEK " I pray you let us satisfy our eyes With the memorials and things of fame, That do renown this city," where his Henrys and Eichards and Margarets and Edwards and Eleanors abide still and shall forever abide while the English speech lasts. VI Something of all this I knew, and more pretended, with a mounting indignation at the fast-coming Don- caster 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 apart- ments 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 fash- ion. 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, 53 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 Boot- ham, and keep them from the wolves. ISTow 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 be- fitted 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 clamber- ing 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 un- tidy goats and delightfully dirty geese. There was no trace of a moat outside the wall, where pleasant cot- tages 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 jSTorman 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 condemna- tion. 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 54 NINE DAYS' WONDEE IN YORK 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 port- cullis 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 be- cause of the eonversability 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 six- pence, as the case might be. After I had confided that I was an American, he said one day, " Ah, the Amer- icans 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. Kather harder, sir." 55 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES We remained not the less friends with that mystery between ns; 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 mtich like our own. But apparently those York women re- sisted 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 Eomans 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 56 it'TTw'' 1 I ,>L /:j:W 'L • I ^^ rtif JU_ \Qi mn NINE DAYS' WONDEE IN YOEK that Georgian architecture which seems the last word in its way, and which is known here in our older edi- fices 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 man- sions which hung their trees over the spiked coping of their high-shouldered walls and gates, and seques- tered I know not what damp social events in their flowery and leafy bounds. 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 recog- nized 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 for- give 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 con- versation 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 pleasaiiter 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 can- opied counter, three deep, and humming pleasantly 57 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 market-place, 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 Plenry IV. ; or some such execution. What riches of story has not York to browbeat with- al the storyless 'New - Yorker who visits her ! That Henry IV. was he whom I had lately seen triumph- ing near Shrewsbury in the final battle of the Eoses, where the Red was so bloodily set above the White; and it was his poetic fancy to have N"orthumberland, 58 NINE DAYS' WONDEE IN YORK when lie bade him come to York, pass through the gate- way 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 ef- ficaciously 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 trans- lation of St. William's bones to the Minster; Edward II. retreated from his defeat at Bannoekburn 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. Kichard III. was welcomed there before his rout and death at Bosworth, and was truly mourned by the citizens. Henry VII. wedded Eliza- beth, the " White Eose 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 5 59 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES son, Charles I., was there early in his reign, and touch- ed 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 CuUoden after the defeat of the Pretender, visited the city and re- ceived 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 memo- ries haunted my York less than the Eoman 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 commodi- ously 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 Eellona near Bootham Bar, 60 s % ^ ^^^^^"-""^ ' -^vX'* :^^ NINE DAYS' WONDEK IN YOEK 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 Constantino, in whom the instinct of political Christianity must have begun to stir as soon as he was chosen emperor. Bi^t I dare say I heard the muted tramp of the Sixth Legion about the Yorkish streets above all other martial sounds be- cause 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 pen- sive music or romantic verse, inviting the moonlight and the nightingale, but, wanting these, make shift with the noonday and the babies in perambulators neg- lected by nurse-girls reading novels. The babies and the nurses are not allowed in the museum of antiquities, which is richer in Roman re- mains 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 neigh- borhood of York, and, from the graves uncovered in the railway excavations, coffins of lead and stone for civ- ilians, 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. Prob- ably 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 61 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 es- sentially 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 irre- sponsive 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, dress- ed 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 ISTew 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 62 NINE DATS' WONDEE IN TOEK the station in relation to some trunks bearing her in- itials 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. 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 Min- ster. 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, pass- ing 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 63 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES service, and when the tourist will, or can, for the sight of the time-mellowed, beautiful stained glass of its east- ward 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-Eoman-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 be- sieged 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. 64 1 ^^^H^BIh a ""W Jr-.* ■« 1 lib- :*'"^ ■ - 'i f 1 ■ 11. *■'■»,■.,.'■ t'^f-^t-Si 'I'^if' ^ aj'V^ : ■" -, i'#: ■•;■' ^^^R^ ''•'^' ' 1 V' '. ^^^^^H jk.- > J2 ^i i .?=:^ ^^ B' m ^s^ Ul: i-¥ ■pw A ^^^H ui NINE DAYS' WONDER IN YOEK In New York the Christians have grown milder, and now they only keep the Jews out of their clubs and their homes. 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 cus- todian, a professional compassion for those poor Jews of nine hundred years ago, and, being moved by our confession of our nationality, owned to three " nev- vies " 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 Lon- don, and yet the Ouse is not destitute of sea or river craft. These were of both steam and sail, and I my- self have witnessed the energy with which the reluc- tance 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 65 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 YOEKISH EPISODES TWO YOEKISH EPISODES Ceetaistly I had not come to York, as certainly I would not have g-one anjAvhere, for battle - fields, but becoming gradually sensible in that city that the bat- tle of Marston Moor was fought a few miles away, and my enemy Charles I. put to one of his worst de- feats there, I bought a third-class ticket and ran out to the place one day for whatever emotion awaited me there. 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. Pres- ently I overtook one, a gentle old farm-wife, a withered blonde, whom I helped with the bundles she bore in 69 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 inter- est, 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 ovm cattle, sheep, and horses, and were well content with them- selves. 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 friend- ly 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 tovm, 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 70 TWO YOEKISH EPISODES 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 trivi- ality 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 farm- house, 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 gar- den 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 ad- venture. By taking myself firmly in hand, and say- ing, " It was yonder to the left where I met my kind bicycler, and we vainly communed of my evanescent 71 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES battle-field," and so keeping on, I got safely to the sta- tion 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 in- quiry, 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 ^vent thinking that the difference was a dif- ference between human nature long mellowed to its conditions, and human nature rasped on its edges and fretted by novel circumstances to a provisional harsh- ness. I chose to fancy that unhuman nature sym- pathized with the English mood; in the sheep bleat- ing from the pastures I heard the note of Words- worth'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, strew- ing 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 ex- pected, and I disabled their looks by finding them as 72 TWO YOKKISH EPISODES 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 litera- ture, 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 doAvn with mugs of ale, and cozily talking. They gained indefinitely in my inter- est from being served by a lame woman, with a rhyth- mical 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 Eoyal Highnesses the Prince and Prin- cess of Wales, the late Premier, the Marquis of Salis- bury, 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. Ill 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 excur- 73 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES sion to Bisliopstliorpe, down the Ouse, on one of the cosey little steamers whieli ply the stream ■without un- reasonably 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 doAvn the current. It was a perfect voyage, as perfect as any I ever made on the Mississippi, the Ohio, the St. Lawrence, or the Hud- son, 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 be- ing 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 pleas- ant interval from the river a villa rose against a back- ground 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 74 i^u-jt ■ r *\ '^^. TWO YOEKISH EPISODES 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 tup- pence 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. So we went round by an alluring road to its fork- ing, 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 en- tered the archiepiscopal grounds through a sympa- thetic Gothic screen, as I will call the overture to the Gothic edifice in my defect of architectural ter- minology, 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, claim- ing 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 f am- 75 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES ily 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 water- front 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 but- tered tea-cake, with or without currants, to jam sand- wiches, 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 76 TWO' YORKISH EPISODES fovir, 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 rail- way shops, iff o, they did not belong to any union ; the railway men did not seem to care for it ; only a " bene- fit 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 ex- pressed 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 steam- er's whistle sounded, and held her boat for us to get safely in. The most nervous of our party of- fered 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 77 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 A DAY AT DONCASTER AND AN HOUR OUT OF DURHAM The Doncaster Kaces 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 knowl- edge — I said to myself, " Not mere amusement " — and set out for Doncaster iTnburdened by the lightest fact concerning the place. I learned nothing of it when there, but I have since learned, from divers trustworthy sources, that Don- caster is the Danum of Antoninus and the Dona Ceaster of the Saxons, and that it is not only on the line of the ISTortheastern Kailway, 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 80 AT DONCASTER AND DURHAM into a conformity with its line, like a map of the straightest American railway routes. Unless my ignorance has been abused, nothing re- markable has happened at Doncaster in two thousand years, but this is itself a distinction in that eventful England where so many things have happened else- where. It is the market town of a rich farming re- gion, 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 1Y78, though he really established his Day two years earlier. Doncaster is a mighty pleasant, friendly, rather mod- ern, 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 pos- sessed itself of the street, and lined the curbstones up and down with spectators, their bodies bent for- 81 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES ward, 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 popu- lace 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 dif- ferent 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 1 should have been disappointed to leave his realms with- out 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 with- out 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 jou 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 82 AT DONCASTEE AND DUEHAM the more a form he is the more conformahle he is to the English ideal of a monarch. But no Englishman apparently knows hetter than he when to leave off be- ing a form and become a man, and he has endeared himself to his people from time to time by such inspira- tions. 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, hav- ing had it out with life, he is as amiable and as un- ceremonious 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 king- ship is an idolatry; but he is a fetish with an uncom- mon 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 adminis- tratively are, and still be incalculably reasonabler, as republicans, than those well-governed monarchists. Some of us are apt to forget the immense advan- tage which we have of the monarchical peoples in hav- ing 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 sillv 83 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 Kussia 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. Pie looked like a man of sense, and not like a man of sentiment, that day as he drove through the Don- caster 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. 84 AT DONCASTEE AND DUB HAM It was difficult to realize him for what he was, and, in the nnmilitary 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 com- fortably 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. Ill The races were some miles away, and when we got to the tracks we did not find their keeping very dif- ferent from that of the Saratoga tracks, though 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, 85 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 be- cause in this, as in so many other things, we lack in- centive and invention, and are fondly colonial and im- itative ; we ought to call it the Dirt, for that is what it is with us. As a spectacle, the racing lacks the defini- tion 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 de- lays 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 thick- ened in English bloom and bulk, which is always fine to see, and bubbled over with the babble of multitudi- nous 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 86 AT DONCASTER AND DURHAM 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 be- fore. Then it was that the girl, with the watch on her breast, turned and asked, " Isn't it sad ?" 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 gentletneri 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 87 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 mon- arch. 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 our- selves 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, AT DONCASTEE AND DURHAM 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 book- seller'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 de- votions, and the Church is hardly more national than the Turf. 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 Don- caster, 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 cross- ing 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 sem- blance 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 89 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 com- plete, 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 Amer- icans, 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 hun- dreds 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 va- rieties 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 90 AT DONCASTEE AND DURHAM 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, Iforman, 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 objec- tion: 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 zig- zag and lozenge figures chiselled in their surfaces, weak- ened 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 Dur- 7 91 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES ham. and the Judges of the Assize Courts live when they are residents in the castle. One sees their apart- ments, 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 Will- iam 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 ir. 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 guide- book, and may be summoned from its page to the cham- bers of the beautiful old place by any traveller intend- ing impressions for literary use from a meditevar en- vironment 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 sur- prise he must have felt at my ignorance and an- 92 AT DONtJASTEE AND DURHAM swered gently, " The Weare." " Ah, to be sure! The Weare," I said, and thanked him, and longed for more talk with him, but felt mysfelf 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 infornied. That rich, chill gale was still tossing and buffeting the tree tops, aiid 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 sudden- ly added, " Help a poor man !" I was not wholly sur- prised at the climax, and I offered him, provisionally, a penny. " Will that do ?" He hesitated perceptibly ; then he allowed, with a subtle reluctance, " Tes, that '11 do," and so passed on to satisfy, 1 hope, thfe wish he thought he had. 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 in- duced 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 clergy- 93 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES man. whom I found looking at the pretty shilling edi- tions 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 twi- light, 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 con- jectures, 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 think- ing he wished he was at home. THE MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS THE MOTHER GP THE AMEEIOAN 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 24:th that we went this divine journey. My companion was that com- panionable 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 re- gion that George William Curtis' people came from, hard by Roxburgh, and Eliot's, the Apostle to the In- dians; again we skirted the Ealph Waldo Emerson country, with its big market tovm of Bishop's Stort- ford ; and beyond Ely, where we stopped for the Cathe- dral 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 com- 97 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES partment everywhere. " Back where those chickens 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 nat- ural 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. Bo- tolph's Church stood dim against the sky. It was a long drive through the suburban streets from the sta- tion 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 wel- comed 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 al- lowed no doubt of its genuineness. In the dining-room, which was also the reading - room, there was an ad- mirable image of a fire in the grate, and a prevail- ing warmth and brightness which cheered the heart of exile. When we presently had dinner, specialized for 98 MOTHEK OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS us by certain differences from that of two other trav- ellers, 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 try- ing for some mutual acquaintance there we failed ; our good-will was everything; and the solicitor was intel- ligent 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 Eng- lish coasts, that he was from Holland, and next morn- ing 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 hap- pened to him ? 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 Eaneuil Hall and Quincy market-places, which are the most pictu- resque 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 In- gram, the less famous but more locally recognized Bos- 99 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES tonian, 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. " E. N.," the otherwise anonymous author of a very intelli- gent and agreeable Handbook of Boston, relates that in his first canvass for Parliament Ingram was op- posed 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 protnised '' to their cousin Ingram," and who thereupon de(3lared 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 Xinr colnshire were in fact closely knit together by ties of kinship, owing, " E. IST." 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 experi- ment or even inquiry. " K. JST." will say nothing of her but that she was born, and that her father was a banker; perhaps he thinks that she has spoken suf- ficiently for herself. The air of the market-place, as we crossed to the church, was of a pleasant bleakness, and the Witham 100 MOTHEE OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS 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 shipy, 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, begun the day be- fore, and to l)e concluded now with some fit religious observance. The blossoms and leaves were a little wilt- ed 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 any- wise too hard, or even hard enough, for such " a fac- tious 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. Ilis conflict Avith 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 Xon-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 cor- bels that' support the timbered ceiling are carved with SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES the arms of certain of the early colonists of New Eng- land." Edward Everett, one of Cotton's descendants, wrote the dedicatory inscription in Latin, which " K. N." has Englished in verse, and I am the more scrupn- lous 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 Gfld 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. Ill 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, 102 MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS and more beautiful, if the faces of some were true like- nesses, but after so many centuries one ought not to require even women to be pretty. 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 dim- ness, 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. ^Tiat was our shame and grief the next morning to find it was a cigar factory, and to learn that cigar and cigarette making was al- most 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 man- ner 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 exciirsion steamer was waiting for the tide to come in and float it for the ful- filment 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 fore- JQ3 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES go 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 re- ject the most smiling chance becaiase you think you can take it any time. The morning was soft and warm, with a sun shin- ing 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 lin- gered 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 this square and beginning to dress their stalls with vegetables, arid fish, and native fruits, such as hard ^ears atid knotty apples, I do not krtow 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 tliat the markets were open at the hour which the gehteeler coinmeree of the pilace found, so indiscreet. They were irregular spaces of a form in keeping with the genferal shambling and shapeless character of the town, which, once for all, I must own was not ah imprisssive place. The best thing in it, aiid the thing you are always coming back to, is the beautiful church, to which we paid a second visit early in the forenoon. We fbiind 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 in- deed, 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, 104 MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS we saw about the town, lounging througli 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, Avhile 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 beau- tiful 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 perfec- tion 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 mediteval whim upon the fancy. ISTot so much pleasure as he might wish mingles with the marvel of 105 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 treat- ment of the tower is unique ; there is nothing to com- pare with it in Boston, llassaohusetts, 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 fur- ther 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 en- tering, 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. 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 106 P^^sv 1 IB'' ^ T'=ii ->£— V aatf^F Jf^,;2g^ ■ "^ 1 M i mL^iju iim^M m 1 MOTHEE OF THE AMEEICAN ATHENS being positively forbidden wc 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. 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 an- swer 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 8 107 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 Lincoln-shire, 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 eonveniente 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 com- plotted 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 sbirts for money, yea even the wornen 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. Be- ing 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 Coimsell of them; and so they Avere 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 dis- miste, & sent to the places from whence they came; but 7. of the prineipall were still kept in prison, and bound over to the Assises." My excellent " E. IST." of the Handbooh of Bos- 108 MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS ton 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 o£ the gentler life of Lincolnshire. Such were Eichal'd Bellingham, Edmund Qtiincy, Thomas Leverett, John Cotton, Samuel Whiting, and others, known to our colonial and national history. iN'ot even Bradford or Brewster, afterward dignified figures in Plymouth col- ony, were of the humble band, men, women, and chil- dren, that the oificers 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 dis- cipline." VI The dungeons which remain to witness of their hard- ships 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 con- jecture with " E. !N"." that they were put there " by a refinenient of cruelty," so that they might suffer the more in that vicinage. " The magistrates " who had " used them courteously and shewed them what fa- vour they could," would not have willed that; but per- haps " 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. !N^either the dungeons nor the kitchens are any longer used ; the spits and grates are rusted where the fires blazed, and 109 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 com- panion, 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 Pil- grims 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; cer- tainly 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 for- gotten 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 ques- tions 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 lit- tle 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 attempts made by some of these & others, to get over at an other 110 MOTHER OP THE AMERICAN ATHENS place. And so it fell out, that they light of a Dutch- man at Hull, having a ship of his owne belonging to Zealand; they made agreements with him, and ac- quainted him -with their condition, hoping to find more faithfuUnes 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 prefijxed 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 Dutch- man 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 chil- dren, which they saw thus to be taken, and were left destitute of their helps ; and them selves also, not hav- ing 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 m SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 assist- ante unto the women. But pitifull it was to see the heavie case of these poore women in this distress : what ■^^eeping & crying on every side, some for their hus- bands, 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, cry- ing for feare, and qxiaking 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 goe 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, tbey were glad to be ridd of thern. 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," vir If there is any more touching incident In the his- tory of man's inhumanity to man, I do not know it, or cannot now recall it ; and it w£fs to visit the scpne of 112 MOTHER OF THE AMEEICAN ATHENS 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 everyivhere. 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 wit- nesses, 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 out 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 hav- ing, 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 git-l, who had left her bar to fetch it in anticipa- tion 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 it- self aright, — available for the long drive to that " large eomone a good way distante from any towne," which we were to make, if we wished to visit the scene of the Pilgrims' stifferings in their second attempt to escape from their dread lord. In this strange equipage, there- fore, 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 113 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 land- scape 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 nomi- nal betters which English cabmen never part with ex- cept in a dispute about fares and distances. We stayed him as well as we could with some grapes and pears, which we foimd 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 Eomanism 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 ques- tioningly about the barrier, or lifting their heads in- differently from the grass. Just before we reached the gate we passed a peasant's cottage, where he was so- ciably getting in his winter's coal, and he and his wife 114 MOTHER OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS 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 'Hew 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. Oif 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 115 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES light, where it stood, withdrawn from the highway, JSTorman and Gothic without, and within all so sweet and bare and clean, that we could not believe in the old ecelesiasticism which persecuted the Puritans mto 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 atro- cious facts altogether. She had such a very charm- ing hat on. The suburbs of Great Grimsby, after you reacli 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 ISTorway, half filling the channel, and with a frilige of tall chimneys from the sawmills along the shores. Great Grimsby is not only the centre of a vast distributing tradei 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 fishin" sail, is only " one of the principal fishing ports " of the United Kingdom. MTiat can one do against those brutal British statistics ? We think our towns o-row like weeds, but London seems to grow half such a weed as Chicago in a single night. 116 MOTHEK OF THE AMERICAN ATHENS After we were got well into the town, we found ourselves part of an immense bicycle parade, with bi- cyclers of both sexes on their wheels, in masks and costumes, Pierrots, and Clowns, and Harlequins and Columbines, in a competition for the prettiest and fan- ciest 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 demand- ing 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 ovit 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. How- 117 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES ever, it must be remembered that tbose 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 WATER- ING-PLACE ABERYSTWYTH, A WELSH WATER- ING-PLACE It is only some six or seven hours by train from Lon- don 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, Grwerful Goch, Festiniog, Bryn Eglwys, Llanidloes, Maertwro, Oarnedd Fibast, Clynog Pwr, 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 Eng- land 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 cen- turies 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. 121 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES Of course, except in the loneliest and farthest places, they speak English as well as Welsh; and they mis- place their aspirates, which they lost under the ~Nov- mans 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 successirai 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 Ref- ormation 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 col- leges. It is a fact which no Welshman will deny that Cromwell was of Welsh blood. Shakespeare was un- questionably 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 Ex- chequer, 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 122 ABERYSTWYTH 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 uni- verse. 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 English- man'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 al- most 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, vol- ubly 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 9 123 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES led through them by the most energetic porter I ever knew. They did not stare down upon us from the un- seemly 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 com- peted fairly well with these in the courses of the col- leges 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 aver- age. I cannot even say that these contemporary ancient Britons had the advantage of the toothless English peas- antry 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 morn- ing 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 Eng- lishwoman, 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 in- 124 ABEEYSTWYTH stead of Cymric-fetched Americans. We had rejected other lodgings because, though their keepers had prom- ised to provision us, it always appeared that we must go out and do the marketing ourselves. I shall last- ingly regret that we did not submit to this condition, for it would have been one of the best means of study- ing 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 re- mained for the Welsh Power to make our stay difficult, and our going easy. 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 Pem- brokeshire 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 show- ing 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 l!formatis planted with a mailed fist at every vantage in Wales, as their sole means of holding down the swarming, 125 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 per- haps the most peaceful coimtry 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 JSTormans 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 im- agined 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. Ill AH 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 E"eegurs ! They're the white ISTeegurs !" and at sight of our compatriotic faces at the pane, these beautiful giants took their stand be- fore our house, and burst into the familiar music of 126 ABEEYSTWYTH the log-cabin, the stern-wheel steamboat, and the corn- field, 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 Eng- lish 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 an- other. He first wrote the englyn in Welsh, and when 127 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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, hut 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 he 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 rhym- ing 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 I^eegurs on the Terrace, I could hardly have expected any livelier ap- peal 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 rea- sonably in its line, and, the Eisteddfod was not out of 128 ABERYSTWYTH keeping with the summer conferetices 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 gentle- man's place not far from Aberystwyth to view as in- dubitable a remnant of the Holy Grail as now exists, and it was my very good fortune through the kind of- fices 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 pret- tiest 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 offer- ings 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 re- member 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 Austra- lia 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 ; 129 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 kind- ness Canada and India and South Africa and Austra- lia, 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. There were about fifty of those British Chautau- quans, 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 Aberyst- wyth; 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 VIIL, certain of the escaping monks came with the relic to the gentle house where we then were, and 130 m \ M m -■M ABEEYSTWYTH placed it in the keeping of the family who have guarded it ever since. 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 Eng- lish public speaking will not pass, but vsdll prosper on through their orators. There were touches of poetry, nationally Welsh, in what she said, and touches of hu- mor 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 suf- ferers 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 sub- ordinate a relic is priceless, and as it is no longer pos- sible to drink from it, we may hope that the fragment 131 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 mod- ern, 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 pleas- aunces 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 un- utterable 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 JSTew England measure, but it is of a softer and smaller beauty; it looks more caressable ; it is like Vermont rather than N"ew Hamp- shire, and it is more like ISTew England than Old Eng- land 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 Eng- lish farm villagers. 132 ABERYSTWYTH 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 through- out 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 al- ways 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 so- journ 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 ac- counted so. There was not much fashion there, ex- cept 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 133 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES women still wear the steeple-crowned hats which we associate with the notion of witches; when they come to market in Aberystwj'th they wear hard, shiny black straw hats like the men's. Amongst the throng of Sat- nrday-night shoppers I saw none of the drunkenness that one sees so often in Scottish streets, and in Eng- lish cities, and, I grieve to say, even in some New Eng- land 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 good- will could not carry the day against the fear of a ser- mon 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. Pos- sibly 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 134 ABEEYSTWYTH 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 visit- ing 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 sub- urban 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 Iforman 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 135 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES their history a catalogue of battles, but it held out Nor- man till the ISTomians turned English. Owen Glen- dover 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 in- vented 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 LLANDUDNO, ANOTHER WELSH WATERING-PLACE Fkoissakt'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 Eng- lish were glad or not when they looked gay. What I seem to be certain of, but I do not say that I am cer- tain, is that they look gayer in their places of amuse- ment than we do. I do not mean theatres, or parlia- ments, 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 N"orth Wales which is called Llandudno in print, and in speech several different ways. The English simply and frankly, after their blunt nature, call the place Landudno, but the Welsh call it, according to one superstition of their double I and their French i^^ Thlandidno. According to another, we cannot spell it in English at all ; but it does not much matter, for the last superstition is the ever-delightful but ever- doubtful George Sorrow's, who says that the Welsh lo 139 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES U is the same as the Spanish U, but who is probably mistaken, most other authorities agreeing that if you pronounce it thl you will come as near it as any Sae- seneg need. It is a constantly besetting question in Wales, where the prefix Llan speckles the map all over, owing to that multitucje 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 admira- tion, like Aberystwyth, its sea front is a shallow crescent, but vaster, with a larger town expanding back of it, and with loftier and subliraer 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 in- sistent 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 sev- eral Chicago families in his house, and fifteen Amer- icans in all; but why the tennis-ground of Bhyl 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 140 LLANDUDNO as possible the syttibol of our successful revolt from tho princes and principles to which they have religiously adhered. 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 mid- way 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 de- grees, except perhaps the highest, unless the nobility 141 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES bring boiled hams with them when they visit the sea- side. 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 house- keepers : " 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 my- self of increasing cost and size. When I alleged, the second morning, that the melon then sold me for six- pence 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 out- numbered 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; 142 LLANDUDNO and I did not go on. It is a loss for me in literature whick translation cannot supply, for the English lovers of Welsh poetry, after praising it to the skies, are never ahle to produce anything which is not direly mechani- cal and vacuous. The native charm somehovs^ 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 of- fender 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 of- fices of the composer. Ill One of the great musical contests, the yearly nation- al Eisteddfod, was taking place that year at the neigh- boring town of Rhyl, biit 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 min- strelsy is, in fact, something pathetic. They like Pier- rots 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 them- selves in moments of exasperation. K"egro minstrelsy is almost extinct in the land of its birth, but in the land of its adoption it flourishes in the vigor of undying 143 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES youth: no watering-place is genuine without it. Bands of ISTiggers haunt the streets and suburbs of London, and apparently every high day or holiday throughout the British Islands requires the stamp of their pres- ence 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 pass- ing of the old plantation life; but as these never ex- isted in Great Britain th^ 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 isl- anders. The English like their l>I"iggers 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 Amer- ican troupe we saw at Aberystwyth went to the op- posite extreme and frankly appeared as the White !N^eegurs. 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 pu]3lic 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 144 M ■■■'«- . v ■ "- - ■'■'«' 1 ^^^H^Swi^K^^^ ' M m ^^^^^^3^^H|K ■^^r»r^J ■B ■s^ i-,^J! L^^a ^^^^^^HK^ ^■^hSi pHp^^^Rl |l^cH^K^^>^ I^^^^P^nui^^^^^^^^^^- kJ KB^K ^^^^^^^^^3B||n ■H LLANDUDNO amphitheatre overlooked by the lofty tops around, and there on the green slope the ISTiggers had set up their stage, and ranged tlie 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 equal- ly in songs of the sloppiest sentimentality and of hu- mor nighest indecency. On the afternoon of our visit the good lady next me could not contain her peculiar pride in the entertain- ment, 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. ]^othing 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 fort- night 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 Eng- land passes round on the chin, so to speak, and though I never went the length of it, I went far enough to 145 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 en- tirely composed of moimtains, blue, blue and enchant- ingly fair. On the townward side you may descend into the Ilappy 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 iipon your vision. Near by, we noticed many depressions and sinkages in the ground, and a conver- sable man in well - oiled overalls who joined ns at a power-house, said it was from the giving way of the timbers in the distised copper-mines. Were they very old, we asked, and he said they had not been worked for forty years; but this, when yo^ come to think of the abandoned Koman 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 146 LLANDUDNO surges back and forth: they must have been worked by British slaves, who may be fancied climbing pur- blindly out when the legions left Britain, and not join- ing 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 oc- ciput of (rreat Orme's Head into the Happy Valley in its bosom, we fell a prey to a conspiracy of boys sell- ing 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 147 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES for joking. There are little burlesque manuals mak- ing merry with the language and its agglutinative pro- lixity, 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 en- joying 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 dis- tinctly 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 chil- dren 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 Eng- land 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 ly- ing 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 some- where in the background, and advertising itself every afternoon by a procession of six young elephants neat- ly 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. 148 rcj.vriQht, I3ni, hi, riiH-rrirr«>^ A: r-niieTwnod, N. Y. THI-: CHEAT PIRR. LLANDT'DN'O LLANDUDNO Besides all these daytime things there were two very good theatres, at one of which I saw Mr. Barrie's Lit- tle Mary given better than in ISTew York (that was easy), and at the other a comic opera, with a bit of comedy or tragedy in a stage-box, not announced in the bills. The audience was otherwise decorous enough to be composed of Welsh Baptist elders and their visiting friends, but in this box there were two young men in evening dress, scuffling with a young woman in dinner decolletee, and what appeared to be diamonds in her ears. They were trying, after what seems the conven- tion 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 mis- giving 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, At- lantic 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. 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 Con- ' 149 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES way, a little way from Llandudno. There, on our of- fering 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 speak- ing their language to right and left of us, while they were so courteous to ixs 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 I^orman castle for its scene, and where it would not have provided a range for target prac- tice 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 adapta- tion 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 150 LLANDUDNO and as eternal as the hunger for it in the human soul. Conway castle is not all a ruin, even as a fortress, how- ever. Great part of it still challenges decay, and is so entire in its outward shape that it has inspired the railway running imder its shoulder to attempt a con- formity of style in the bridge approaching it, but with- out 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 incommoda- tion, 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 sand- stone 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, 151 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 Con- way. 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 ieet for the merry old hostess selling photo- graphs 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 be- lieve 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 oS, 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-Olass 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 driv- ing 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 152 rONWAY CASTLE was " the most cliarming 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 irom placing ourselves for life. We had tea and jam on the pretty lawn, and the society of a large company of wasps of the yellow- jacket variety, which must have heen true Welsh wasps, as peaceful as they were musi- cal, and no interloping Scotch or Irish, for they did not offer to attack us, but confined themselves alto- gether to our jam : to be sure, we thought best to leave it to them. 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 win- ter climate, the presence of many sorts of tender ever- greens 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 Eiyiera, where they bloom in any but an arctic de- gree of cold, will not perhaps hurry to Llandudno much later than ^Kovember. All the way to Penmaen- mawr 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 sepa^ rately, or mingled their dyes in the fearlessness of na- ture 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 decora- tion 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. 153 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 moimtain ; but now and then one found one's self among hajvest-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 farm- houses very alluringly clean and neat, at least on the outside. They were not gray, as in the West of Eng- land, 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 col- leges of the Welsh University. It is still the prefer- ence 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-minded- ness, 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-speak- ing 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 154 PLAS MAWR LLANDUDNO dwarfs the national genius; but in the mean time in Ireland the national genius, long enlarged to our uni- versal English, offers the strange spectacle of an en- deavor to climb back into its Gaelic shell. 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 man- ners. 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 apparent- ly dreaming of offering her a seat, or if they thought of her at all, thought she was well punished for let- ting 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. Per- haps, then, the incident had better be offered as an illustration of Welsh and English manners combined. GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER l^OTHiNG 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 ex- pect to leave him. 1^0 error of the Englishman's latest invader is com- moner 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 af- 159 s SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES fair of a possible future, and the actual Englishman is certainly not yet any sort of American, unless, in- deed, for good and for bad, he is a better sort of Bos- tonian. He does not even speak the American lan- guage, whatever otitlandish accent he uses in speaking his own. It may be said, rather too largely, too loose- ly, 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 English- man may write American, if he is a very good writer, but in no ease does he spell American. He prefers, as far as he remembers it, the ITorman spelling, and, the Conqueror having said " gcole," 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 char- acteristics; or, perhaps, loyalty is not superficial, but is truly of the blood and bone, and not reasoned prin- ciple, 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 idiosyn- crasies. 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 Cleorges, 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 IGO GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER than from the Commonwealth. Democracy had in- deed effected itself in a wide - spread socialism, but the kingship was safe in the hearts of the Queen's suhjeets 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 gen- eral 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 Ood 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 adoratiop 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 with- out loss. I was so far from wishing myself to smile at it, that I darkled most respectfully about it, without the cour- age 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 offen- sive, 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 pres- ent because it was mixed, or used to be mixed, with 161 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 Koyal Pamily, 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. 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 remark- able, 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 ISTew England or in Vir- ginia; 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 ; liis 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 marry- ing her daughter to an English duke, cannot even im- agine an English duke — say, like him of Devonshire, 162 A PRESENTATION AT COURT GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER 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 estab- lished 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 per- son of its possessor than it is with us. It is ancestry, it is the uncontested primacy of families first in their place, time out of mind, that lays its resistless hold upon the fancy and bows the spirit before it. By means of this comes the sovereign effect in the political as well as the social state; for, though the people vote into or out of power those who vote other people into or out of the administration, it is always — or so nearly always that the exception proves the rule — family that rules, from the King down to the least attache of the most unimportant embassy. No doubt many of the English are restive under the fact; and, if one had asked their mind about it, one might have found them frank enough ; but, never asking it, it was with amuse- ment that I heard said once, as if such a thing had never occurred to anybodv before, " Yes, isn't it strange ' 163 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES that those few families should keep it all among them- selves!" 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. Ill 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 uni- versal 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 voli- tion, the inhabitants of the enchanted island universal- ly agree that there is a class of them which can be called out of their names in some sort of title, be- stowed by some ancestral or actual prince, and can forthM'ith be something different from the rest, who shall thenceforth do them reverence, them and their heirs and assigns, forever. By this amusing process, 164 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CIIAEACTER 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 our- selves, 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 com- pensating 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 pa- triotism. An Englishman of the humble or the humbler life may know very well that he is not much in him- self; 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 rev- erence 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 sim- plest 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 dream- ed, as they were, say, in the Erance of the Third Em- pire. There, one fancies, these figments must have 165 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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. Be- sides, 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 recog- nizes 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. Wowhere else in the world is there so much personal independence, with- out 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 pres- ent 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, re- spectfully and patiently entreated. At a railroad junc- tion 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 tak- ing 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 pes- tered them with questions as to the time when trains 166 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHAEACTER 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. In no country less good-hearted than England could anything so wrong-headed as the English baggage sys- tem 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 in- stinct 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, giiiltily or guiltlessly, claim other people's baggage, I do not know; lowt apparently it is 167 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES not the custom. Perhaps in this, the deference for any one within his rights, peculiar to the faery dream, oper- ates 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 ease 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 gentle- man 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 inef- fective 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 radi- antly smiling, as if the struggle had been an agreeable exercise, and he spoke of his antagonist without the 168 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER least exasperation; evidently, he regarded him as one who had justly defended himself from corporate ag- gression; his sympathies were with him rather than with us, perhaps because we had not so vigorously as- serted ourselves. VI A case in which a personal wrong rather than a per- sonal right was offensively asserted, was that of a lady, young and too fair to be so tmfair, in a crowded train coming from the Doncaster Eaces 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 soli- tude 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 pro- test, but gathered up her belongings, and barricaded herself vrith them;. Among the rest there was a type- writing-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 dis- possess 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 tis 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 169 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 np 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 corriTpted by the unseen xVmerican 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 un- cover 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 disagree- able, with the sole exception of our own, which we are constantly wishing to share with other people, especial- ly with English people. We spare them none of it, even in their own country, and yet many of us ob- ject to theirs; I feel that I am myself being rather 170 GLIMPSES or ENGLISH CHAEACTEE 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 pres- ent or recent entente cordiale. None of their idiosyn- crasies is more notable than their patience, their kind- ness 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 be- ing, or its excuses. But you cannot always be enjoying poetry, and I could well imagine that oiir lovers must sometimes prefer to shut the page. The common gen- tleness 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 de- mocracy, being the fine thing it essentially is, should behave so rudely. Must we come to family govern- ment, in order to be filial or fraternal in oxir bearing with one another? Why should we be so blunt, so sharp, so ironical, so brutal in our kindness ? 171 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES VII The single-mindedness of the English is beautiful. It may not help to the instant understanding qf 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; per- haps 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 jou. When, by a chance in- definitely 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 Eng- lish temperament, with a sigh for the comfort of its soft unhurried expectation that there is really some- thing 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 with- out 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- 172 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHAEACTEK Saxon lump, the expectatibn of a humorous sympathy is greater; but there are subtile spirits of Teutonic origin whose fineness we cannot deny, whose delicatfe gayety is of a sort which may well leave ours impeach- ing itself of a heavier and grosser fibre. No doubt you must sometimes, and possibly of tenest, go more than half-way for the response to your humor- ous 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 yoii 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 coihes to the grace of the imaginative in your pleasantry, they will be even beforehand with you. But in their extreme of imper- sonality they will leave the initiative to you in the mat- ter of humor as in others. They will no more seek out your peculiar humor than they will name you in speak- ing 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 couri 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 fdr and watched over and kept from 173 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 es- pecially has at times all but the boldness of the barn- yard 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 see- ing 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 royal- ties 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, 174 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHAEAGTER It is by their personal uninsistence largely, no d6iibt, 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 comer- stones, or preside at races, or teas or bazars, or to repre- sent 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 oft' 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 pres- sure 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 aes- thetic 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 suc- cess of economic inequality with ourselves, among 175 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 pa- triotism, 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 im- plication of an England in the next world as well as in this. We fancy that, because we have here an Episcopal Church, with its hierarchy, we have something equiva- lent 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 in- convenience ; 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 Whitmon- 17C GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER days, and the minor saints' days. When once you have m'astered 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 diction- ary; one pronounces it as one has always heard it pro- nounced. 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 Eng- lish do. He has, for example, always said " financier," with the accent on the last syllable; and if he has con- sulted 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 acceiited 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 ac- cusative 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, 1 found that in the 177 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 ISTational Schools. It is gross- ly believed, or boldly pretended, that till the ISTational 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 every- where south of the Scottish border. Worse yet, the teachers in the ISTational Schools had scattered far and wide that peculiar intonation, that droll slip or twist of the vowel sounds by which the cockney alone former- ly 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 breath- ing, 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 iN^ational School teacher, but I feel quite sure, from long observation of the wrong breath- ing, that the wrong breathing did not spread from Lon- don through the schools, but was everywhere as surely characteristic of the unbred in England as nasality is with us. Both infirmities arei 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 English- men in every part of the kingdom drop their aitches. The English-speaking "Welsh often drop their aitches, 178 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHAEACTER as the English-speaking French do, though the Scotch and Irish never drop them, any more than the Amer- icans, or the English of the second generation among ns ; but the extremely interesting and great little people of Wales are otherwise as vmlike the English as their moth- er-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 gam- blers 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 com- mon 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 persistent- ly. We now absorb, and suppose ourselves to be as- similating, the different voluntary and involuntary im- 179 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES migrations; 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 dovm 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 ac- countant inexact. He was perhaps a man of convic- tions 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 180 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTEE 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 Dorset- shire 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 pa- tiently, 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 181 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 free- ly 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, prob- ably 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 way- faring 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 cer- tain pathway ; you are " requested," and sometimes even " kindly requested " ; I do not know but once I was " respectfully requested." Perhaps that noble- man's possession of these lands was so new that his retainers had to practise something of unwonted rude- 182 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER ness in keeping it wholly his where he chose. At any rate, the rule of civility is so universal that the polite- ness from class to class is, for what the stranger sees, all but unfailing. I dare say he does not see every- thing, 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 ac- ceptances between people of condition, such as I wit- nessed once in a crowded first-class carriage from Lon- don 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 gpntry, by-and-by, could not do better than study such high- breeding. 'If we approach the morals of either superiors or in- feriors, 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 omni- science 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 super- stitious, it is said, and there are few villages or old houses that have not their tutelary spectres. The be- lief 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 Eng- land are much spoiled by the constant aid given them 183 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 readi- iiess 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 small- ness of the sum which may satisfy them. " Five shil- lings 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 com- munity 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 uni- versally 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 ensiles 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 184 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHAKACTER healthy pauper, it would be hay d 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 car- riage from Crewe to Chester, I was joined by a friend- ly 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, v/hich 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 fpurpence by twenty, to make up the difference in money values, 185 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES will find to be the wages of a good mecliaiiic 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 per- haps 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 with- out 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 re- mained 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 !N"orth Britons do, with nothing of our people's husky whine. I found him on further ac- quaintance 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 account- ant, in being very fond of the Welsh ; it must be owned their race seemed to have acquired merit with him 186 GLIMPSES OF ENGXISH CHARACTER through the tip of two sovereigns which his last em- ployer in Llandudno had given him. On the other hand, he had no love for the Italians who were com- ing 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 seem- ed 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 intensi- fyingly, for he was of a Tory mind. He meant the poor among the country people, who have at last mas- tered 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, un- der the lead of a common boss. The texture of so- ciety, 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 interest- ing and important. He seemed not to know what I would be at, and, when he imderstood, he responded I? 187 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES 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 he as diiHcult for a very cul- tivated 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 peo- ple with their little taches would find less anxiety in London than in ISTew 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 psy- chologist, who will have work enough to do if he comes to inquire into such mysteries. One can never be cer- tain 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. Amer- icans 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 188 GLIMPSilS OF ENGLISH CHAEACTEE the occasion, and to become as much as possible an un- known quality, rather than a quality aggressive or posi- tive. Sometimes, when I could feel certain of my ground, I ventured my conviction that Eriglishmen were not so niuch interested in Americans as those Americans who stayed at home were apt to think; but when I once expressed this belief to a Unitarian miiiister, whom I met in the West of England, he re- ceived it with surprise and refusal. He said thdt in his oviTi immediate circle, at least, his friends were interested and increasingly interested iii Artierica, what she was and what she meant to be, and still looked toward her for the lead in certain high things which Englishmen havfe ceased to expect of themselves. My impression is that most of the most forward of the English Sociologists regard America as a back number iri those political economies which imply equality as well as liberty in the future. They do not see any difference between our conditions aild theirs, as regards the man who works for his living with his hands, ex- cept that wages are higher with us, and that physitally there is more elbow-room, though mentally and morally there is not. Save a little in my Unitarian minister, and this only con jectur ally, 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, arid 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 cotild again. 189 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES XVI Yet lie was standing stiffly up for himself, and strew- ing his convictions and opinions broadcast as the Eng- lish 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 in- stance, 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 iind 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 ac- count in her work being shown in society. 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 190 AN ENGLISH HOTISE-MAID GLIMPSES or ENGLISH CHAEACTER 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 I" 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 accord- ing to their means than we are; or than those Conti- nental 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 Eng- lish 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, 191 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES and perhaps onr inclination, obliges us to be un-Eng- lish, whereas we do iiot trouble ourselves to be un- Freneh, or un-Italian, for we are so by nature. The effort involved in distinguishing oTirselves breeds a sprt of annoyance, or call it no more than uneasiness, which is almost as bad as a bad conscience ; and in oiir 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 comps to us for the pvirpose ; in his own house, he is civilly un- aware 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 cqn see why he should not be frank ; he has a kind of helplessness in always speak- ing 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 use- ful 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 Avhich so mystifies the American, but plenty of the loyalty of reason, and expected a Utopia which should not be of political but of econom- ical cast. But one was always coming xipon illustra- tions 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 patriotisni. I always talked with the lower 192 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER 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 accluaintance of a friendly man letting his horse browse the wayside turf. He was in the livery-stable line, but he had been a sftldier many years. Upon this episode he became freely auto- biographical, 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 iri 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 mi- nority 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 sumilier as their savings will pay for. It is said that families in very humble station save the year round for these va- cations, and, having put by twelve or fifteen pouhds, repair to some such waterside as Blackpool, or its analogue in their neighborhood, and lavish them upon 193 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES the brief joy of the time. They take the cheaper lodg- ings, and bring with them the less perishable provis- ions, 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 pass- ive 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 al- most indefinitely. I suppose it led to many engage- ments 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 constimed as in the English summer resorts. It is probably of the innutritions 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 194 GLIMPSES OF ENaLISH CHARACTER lound 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 band 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 in- dulgence. I siippose 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. 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 de- struction ; 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 with- out gayety, and certainly not without noise; and when 195 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES the afternoon came, the lower classes, such as hdd re- mained in town, thronged to the public houses, aiid tlie upper classes to the evening parade in the Park. As to the relative amount of church-going, I will not even assume to he sure ; hut I have a fancy that it is a rite much less rigorous than it used to be. Still, in pro- vincial 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 wom- en, 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 iil 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 sesthetic reasons. But, in these guesses, one must remember that the English who remained at home were never Puritan- ized, never in such measure personally conscieneed, as those who came to America in the times of the suc- cessive Protestant fervors; and that is a thing which we are apt to forget. The home-keeping English con- tinued, 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 im- possible to the sectaries always taking stock of their souls. In fact, the Calvinists of ISTew England were almost essentially different from the Calvinists of Hol- 106 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CIIAEACTER land, of Prance, 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 Amer- ican Puritans became, in a worldly sense, provincial- ized, 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 com- monalty, a commonalty supported again by a proleta- riat resting upon immeasurable ether; with a systeiu of government kept, by assent so general that the dis- sent does not matter, in the hands of a few families reared, if not trained, to power; with a society so in- timately 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 parefully applied, that restive misery never quite grows rebellious ; with a patriotism so inborn and in- grained 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 des- perately perfect. " They have got it down cold," he 197 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES must say to himself, and confirm himself in his unf aith 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 Ealph Waldo Emer- son whom we always find ahead of us when we look back for him, was once, as he relates in a closing chap- ter 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 neithei 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-resist- ance, 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 an- other gun, the law of love and justice alone, can ef- fect 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 nocessite.' " In other words, Emerson laid before his great English friends a programme, as nearly as might then be, of philo- sophical anarchism, and naturally it met with no more acceptance than it would if now presented to the most 108 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER 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 night- mares to which their faery dream seemed so long sub- ject, 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 pa- triots 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 un- kindly, 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 de- rive its Just powers from the consent of the governed. \Mien one encounters this sort of Englishman, one 199 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES thinks silently of the child labor in the South; of the monopolies in the North, of the companies which gov- ern while they serve us, and one hopes that the Eng- lishman 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, A\ithout secret self-contempt, one can be more openly proud of our increasing fortunes and our irlcreasing 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 sus- ceptibilities 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 Eng- lish society, but certainly he would not be so much con- sidered 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; arid his touch, which is no longer sovereign for scrofula, can add dig-nity 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 fi'equent astigmatism may impart to it. Meantime, in its ampler 200 GLIMPSES OF ENGLISH CHARACTER 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 re- lation 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 sys- tem, as a true believer in the oligarchically adminis- tered monarchy, Gladstone was illogical, and Tennyson was logical. THE HUMAN INTEEEST OF BUXTON THE HUMAN INTEREST OP BUXTON The customs inspector at Liverpool, vaguely but po- litely pawing over the contents of our trunks, could not find words warm enough in praise of our purpose of going to Buxton for a brace. Dropping an aspirate here and there among the clothes and picking it out to put it on in the wrong place, he said that there was nothing hke Buxton for recovering from the languor of a sea voyage, and it was so near to Liverpool that we were in a manner already there. In a manner we were, after two or three hours' rim or climb, with quite as many changes and waits at invigorating way-stations, rising one above another into the highest air in England. But the genius of English railroad travel is, after comfort, change, and you will do well not to repine at this, for you will not be able to help it, and it is so much eased by the porters at the smallest stations, with their promptness in seizing your hand-baggage and their instinctive recognition of your trunks among the contents of the luggage-van, that you had better resign yourself unmurmuring to the charm of the scenery till the train, which is to carry you half an hour farther, arrives to fulfil its mission. If you add birds singing wildly at one of the stops, and dusty-white men drawing the lime-kihis at another, you have induce- ments to resignation which the most rebellious spirit can scarcely resist. 205 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES It was, perhaps, the mildest, the most amiable day of a singularly sullen English summer, and after we had left all imaginable junctions behind we arrived at Buxton in the glowing expectation of a long term of settled weather. We were in such sympathy with the simshine that we asked to have it in our rooms at the agreeable hotel which we found "standing in its own grounds," as hotels like to do in England, with wide gardens and groves about it; and the manageress yielded us such rooms as we desired with a readiness in which I now realize that we might have suspected something ironical. But we did not; we pinned our faith to every ray of that sunshine, and as it waned with the waning afternoon we bade it farewell in the confident belief of seeing it the next morning. Meanwhile we had happened upon the most psycho- logical moment of the whole Buxton year. It was the time of dressing the wells, which in an older dispensation would so probably have been blessing them, but which now consisted of garlanding the different health-giving founts with flowers, and matting the gables of the more enthusiastic shops, and adorning the fronts of the public buildings with natural or artificial blossoms. Just what sort of health the founts gave I will not make sure, but I will say it was relief from rheumatism or uric acid in some form, for uric acid is a thing which so pervades the English system that specifics for it are found wherever medicinal springs burst from English ground. Springs, however, you must not say: wells is the word, and some- how a much more engaging word with an old-time flavor and a resonance from early piety that echoes in many a holy well and well of this saint or that, of one sex or the other, insomuch that the surly Puritans of the Common- 206 THE HUMAN INTEREST OE BUXTON wealth forbade the sick to resort to them at Buxton, hold- ing it a superstitious yielding to popish idolatry. But the dressing of the wells has survived the past rigor, and we proposed to pass the next day visiting them, and the day after in going to Haddon Hall, which is as hard by as any place in England is to any other, and is sacred to the simple exploit of Dorothy Vernon in eloping with the young lord of Rutland five himdred years ago. That first silvern afternoon we would spend as the small change of golden guineas of days of sunshine to come; we would lavish it in loitering up and down the glowing streets; we would waste it in sitting on the benches in the own-grounds of the hotel and wishing, like Mrs. Allen at Bath, in Northanger Abbey, that we "had a general acquaintance" among the outwardly repellent but no doubt inwardly hospitable English folk whom we saw coming and going on the neat paths or bowed over their novels in the portico. The warmth, the excessive splen- dor of the day, was so generally confessed that we found one clerical father and clerical daughter withdrawn from the fervor in a covert of the garden so dense and dark that we shuddered in passing it; but they had saved them- selves from sunstroke and were rapt in their respective romances. II The amiable afternoon waned quite to our minds in the fulfilment of such desultory impulses as followed one an- other and resulted in a pretty fair exploration of the town. Buxton must, of course, have some historical interest of its own, but our local guide-book did not vaunt its memories, and people who come to Buxton seeking the past always go to Haddon Hall for it. We should have done well to go our first afternoon when the sun shone into Qur carefully selected southern windows, but we gave 207 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES it to the pleasant up-and-down-hill streets, the tasteful exteriors of the wells and baths, and especially that charming Crescent of Georgian architecture, softly saffron in the mellow light, which so agreeably expresses an elderly ideal of lodgings, and of delay for the cure of complaints not to be vulgarly hurried in convalescence. A yet older ideal is expressed in the neighboring hostelry to which modern sympathy may resort in compassion of that hapless Mary Stuart who sojourned there, in one of those many wanderings of hers which were always the ways to dusty death. Hard by this sojourn and in front of the more modern Crescent an upland park or open ground rises, and there is another public park on the river which carries off the waste argon, helium, and radium of the wells. Besides these attractions, there are numbers of nice shops where ladies can buy almost anything they do not need between the paroxysms of their neuralgia, and there are several pretty tea-shops where on a Saturday people can drink tea enough to last them over Sunday; or had better do so, for in comphance with the universal English custom the places are fast locked on the Sabbath — ^you may inebriate, but not cheer yourself then. But, above all, there are in Buxton The Gardens with Open Spaces, with a Sylvan Park, with Sylvan Walks, with Recreation Groimds, with a Grotto, with Artificial Lakes and a Pavilion, where you may happen upon music when it is playing. It is a very pleasant pavilion when silent and is in the immediate neighborhood of a circular tea- kiosk of the most amiable temperament, with blooming young Enghsh maids serving the largest strawberries grown in England, which is really saying everything. In those places and the like we vainly expected the morrow when we should motor through the sparkling air of Buxton to Haddon Hall and surprise Dorothy Vernon before she could send word she was not at the moment 203 THE HUMAN INTEEEST OF BUXTON eloping. The air of Buxton, by the way, is "specifically lighter by reason of its altitude, and drier and of more tonic property than elsewhere in the same latitude" (so I read in my local guide-book) and the rainfall, though heavy, "is one of the most important and beneficial factors of the climate, the air being washed, purified, and freed from bacterial and other impurities." Through this thor- oughly laundered atmosphere we were not surprised to find the sun trying to look in at our windows when we woke the next morning for that nine-o'clock breakfast which is the earliest that love or money can buy anywhere in England. But the weather was holding effects in reserve against us which we learned to know later of the weather-wiser. When the maid or the valet opens your curtains and you exult in the sunshine, she or he says, " Yes, but too bright." "How can a morning be too bright?" you scoff to yourself, and you do not acquire modesty till ex- perience confirms the precept that if a day in England opens cheerfully it will go on to gloom and close in tears. Far better it should dawn sadly amidst clouds and downpours, for then it cannot be worse, and there are chances that it may be better. Ill But the sun went down as radiantly on our first day as it rose on our second, and we confidingly foregathered with our fellow-guests after dinner in the lounge of the hotel for that entertainment which the summer hotel seldom fails of in England. This lounge was a sort of wide open space next the entrance, with the porter's booth and the manageress's oflace at one side and a very inade- quate grate at the other, which people tried not to keep each other away from. Beyond stretched writing-rooms, yawned drawing-rooms frostily; a very noble stairway mounted from the lounge, but there was a lurking lift at 209 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES one corner, kept secret by a uniformed boy who carried a key and locked and unlocked it on demand. Every night there was an entertainment in the lounge by strolling professionals; even Sunday night there was a concert. The concert was good, being mainly Welsh in the singing, but the entertainment was truly deplorable; and the start- ing tear was the more compelled by the pity of having the head entertainer come round with a plate and grate- fully receive whatever was dropped into it. For shame and sorrow we paid what we thought would have been just gate money, and I dare say others did the same, but our hearts ached for the poor soul's humilia- tion, though he carried it off with a chipper ease and the queer gentlemanliness which seems the effect of the general civilization in England; his evening dress grieved one the more for him. But it was pleasant to have him speak to us in gratitude, for no one else spoke to us until the last night but one, when a kind lady had compassion on our isolation and took us into her friendly protection, so that we felt ourselves a part of society from that on. I cannot honestly say that it would have been different in America with the like hotel company or that I would myself have made up to two strangers under the circum- stances. Perhaps the others were there for some ailment and were silent in question of the effect the free gases of the wells were having on their respective gout, rheumatism, and neuralgia, and just how much argon, helium, and radium were present in the waters. They might also have their doubts of the characteristic dryness of the Buxton air and the advantage of its great elevation above the sea. Even at a thousand feet the weather must have seemed very wet; and though the healing properties of the wells were known to the Romans, those Romans were without exception dead and could not be considered successful cases. 210 THE HUMAN INTEREST OF BUXTON IV In the morning the wisdom of the head porter decided us to abandon to the elements a day that had dawned so brightly and to take our chances in the town instead of venturing to Haddon Hall. The weather really had mo- ments of relenting, and in one interval of the rain we saw the files of school-children, who shared our courage, stream- ing down the street and making their way to the theatre where they were to give the dances for the prizes offered. This was after the crowd, assembled on the hillside front- ing the chief well and the Crescent, had scattered in despair of the promised dancing in the open there; but it is to be said of the theatre that it was no damper or darker than the plain day, and that if the dances (such as they are now reviving all over England from the times when England was merrier than now, in ignorance of the Lloyd-Georgian oppression of the poor dear lords, and nobody questioned their right to go untaxed in their respective thousands of acres) were given on a stage, instead of the grounds before the wells, they had some advantages there. I am sorry I cannot report the theatre as thronged, but there was gate money classified in amount according to your rank in life or your depth of pocket, and that made the difference, perhaps. The place smelled of wet woollens, but the enthusiasm of some small dogs could not be quite repressed. One of them chewed upon the gloves of an American spectator; it was explained by its mistress that she had tried to leave it at home, but it would not be left. The audience was mostly children in charge of those self-sacrificing elders who take children to shows the world over; and when the dances were done (not too early done) we all, children and elders, trooped out and witnessed the distribution of large baskets of buns among the dancers. Every child 211 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES was entitled to a bun; a bun of the sort that seems native to the island and not known elsewhere; slightly sweetened, thick, far round and speckled with not infrequent ciu'rants. Personally, I never ventured upon such a bun, but a middle-aging American who once did so told me that he was not hungry again for three weeks. I am not saying that buns are worse than pop-corn balls. We ourselves were not really entitled to buns, and as we were rather faint from our pleasure, we hurried to a very cosey little tea-shop which we had noted in a neigh- boring street and had cups of that delicious tea which they know how to make only in England. But here we observed, as often before and afterwards, that a tea-shop is either overcrowded or empty and that the service super- abounds or insuffices. The mistress of the place was very happy in her inability to meet the wants of her guests and smilingly left them standing till tables should be vacated, and then thirsting till earlier orders should be filled. It was all very kindly and simple, and the mufl&ns, when they came, were as good as the tea,_and no one could complain. The next day was Sunday, and the tea-shop was fast shut against the pubUc, which slaked its tea thirst we could not imagine where. I notice the same rule in the New York tea-shops, and it remains a universal mystery how people who raven for tea and muffins on week-days are carried over the Sabbath with neither. It is, perhaps, a miracle. That night we denied ourselves the entertainment in the lounge and went to the Fair which was to do its part, in the upper town, toward the festival of dressing the wells. It was an English Fair of those that follow holidays and aimiversaries round the English year and purvey a simple joy to such as have pence or shillings to spend. There 212 THE HUMAN INTEREST OF BUXTON were streets of booths and tents lit, when the late twilight passed, with torches of smoky gasolene, and offering games and toys to the wanton desires of pleasure, or bargains in hardware, china, jewelry, and haberdashery to adventurous thrift, with shrill cries of invitation from the showmen and showwomen. Every other booth or tent' was for the joy of throwing, things at Aimt Sallies and the masks of negroes, with prizes (preferably cocoanuts) for the success- ful marksmen; behind, the wagons were drawn up, and you heard between those clamors the soft deep breathing of horses and the muffled sound of their comfortable stamping. There were shows of several vaudeville types, some with a great outward splendor of gilded carving and some with the evanescent allure of clowns on the point of disappearing into the interior. There was, if my senses do not retroactively deceive me, a hiss and a smell of frying things, which were eaten from the fingers, and there were paper cones of American ice-cream, so called, which found acceptance with that amiable British public, though the mere sight of them sent the cold chills over the Americans who beheld them. There was no exhibition of fruits,' or flowers, or live stock, or agricultural imple- ments, such as take away the blame of the trotting- matches and balloon ascensions at our country fairs. But there were some serious attractions like character-reading by a sober-faced yoimg man in a frock-coat, from whom you learned to know yourself for a penny (or was it a tuppence?) and bore away a certificated detail of your qualities and the defects of them. Otherwise there was nothing but merry-making, with some palliation in the fact that nobody seemed to be made very merry, even by the merry-go-round. The fair folk seemed of another race from the town-folk, and perhaps the free air and the open life breeds, under the swarthy skins, a gypsy soul wanting to their patrons. Quite alien to both sorts was the aging 213 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES Italian sibyl always to be found at public joys the world over with her fortune-telling love-birds. After haAring my character read I could not help having my fortune told, and when I pleaded in Italian for a favorable destiny the sibyl was so glad of the sound of her home speech in the well- washed air of Buxton, that she instructed her bird to fit me out with a fate that a far yoimger man might have envied. Put into words, it does not sound a boisterous festivity, but it sufficed to amuse the crowd that traipsed and clumped round and round and to and fro, and remained there under the flare of the smoky lamps long after their kindly noise had followed us down into the lower town past the pavilion in the park where the musicians, de- spairing in the rain, were putting up their string and wind instruments and leaving their wide-spreading fan of empty chairs to welter through the wet night. Not that the night was altogether wet. It had rained so aim- lessly, so absent-mindedly, at the Fair that nobody seemed to notice it; but it was an earnest of showers to come, which read the riddle of the manageress's almost eager willingness to give us sunny rooms at the hotel. If we paid more for that sunny exposure (I do not know that we did) we were the more deceived, as poor Desdemona says. Or is it Ophelia? That was the only fault of the hotel, and the hotel was not to blame for it. Otherwise it was so good that I am sure it would have had sim for us if it could. It was, like other provincial hotels, kept on the American plan, the European plan being unknown in Europe except for very transient stays; that is, there was an inclusive rate coming to about three dollars a day. The meals were served in courses and were very good, and the servitors were those Germans who resort to England in order to learn the language and (as the more jingoistic natives believe) to spy out the strategic nakedness of the land and prepare 214 THE HUMAN INTEEEST OF BUXTON the way for a German invasion. They are invariably willing and prompt, and we were sorry to have a middle- aged lady of military bearing rather scold the poor fellow whose ministrations we shared with her; she was the only English person whom I ever heard harsh with a domestic; ordinarily the thank-yous and the pleases superabound from the served to the serving and back. VI The next day being not only a Smiday, but a Sunday when we decided that it would be useless to go to Haddon Hall, which would be as fast shut as any tea-shop, we advised further with the head porter as to what we had better do. I do not know why a head porter should so often wear a red coat and a striped waistcoat with lustrous buttons, or why these garments should lend him authority and compel faith in him, but they seem to do so. I myself would now think twice before trusting them, for I have sometimes found head porters of inferior judgment regarding routes and trains. Once a head porter in Liverpool sent us to Oxford by the London and North- western instead of the Great Western, with the result that we changed cars four times on the way, and at Oxford our conductor, with a little variation of uniform, degenerated into a porter and handled our baggage both large and small. I cannot make a like complaint of the head porter at Buxton; he remained of a pristine splendor to the last, and he advised us as well as we would let him concerning the drive we chose. We chose the drive to the Cat-and- Fiddle tavern mainly because the charge for it was lower than any other we could make out, and the air higher by some hundreds of feet than the air of Buxton, which is the highest in England. The charge was so much for the carriage and so much more for the driver, as at Great 215 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES Malvern; and again I had to renounce my preference for a fixed rate in tips: the fee to the driver was about twice what I should have given if it had been left to my caprice. Still, I own that the principle is right, and the sum was not really bankrupting; if we could have had a little warmth of weather thrown in I should not now be mur- muring. Even as it was, by mufHing to the chin on a day which had not begun too bright for intervals between the rains, we contrived to enjoy the noble savagery of the moors to which we mounted. Nothing surprises the New-Worldling more than this wildness which is so frequent in the Old World, where the hand of man might seem to have passed over every inch of the earth's surface. Here in the north of Derbyshire as in the south of Devonshire we traversed vast lonely wastes of moorland. The road trailed itself up and on and long before us as we chmbed to the Cat-and-Fiddle, which at last grew a stony nubbin on the topmost reach, and lured us with a mystic promise of interest which the reader must seek the fulfilment of for himself. Now and then we passed a huge char-£i-banc, or omnibus, lumbering upward Avith its twelve or twenty passengers devoutly trusting in this promise. Now and then it was a pedes- trian we passed, and oftenest a woman, young and of gentle rank apparently, who kept the solitary road without fear and evidently without danger; now and then a bicycler labored by or fell behind, walking his or her machine in the steep places. On every hand the great moorland drooped to the low horizon in one unchanging gloom of low scrub, mostly heather, I suppose, seamed by deep gulleys and scarred by the ineffectual fires that had been kindled to destroy it. The dull heavens clung close about it in clouds that meditated rain, and cold winds swept it in mid-June as if it had been in mid-November. At last we stopped before the Cat-and-Fiddle, a plain 216 THE HUMAN INTEREST OF BUXTON two-story hostelry which bore a tablet on its front repre- senting both these musical intruments, the hair of the one roughed backward by the blast and the strings of the other shrieking in the flaw. I say this for the dramatic effect; and perhaps I exaggerate, but one must do some- thing to support the supposition that the Duke of Devon- shire used to bring a cat and fiddle with him to help him make merry in his visits to an otherwise disconsolate inn. Besides the inn, there is an oblong tea-house of corrugated iron (much prized for temporary structures throughout England) on the summit, where the tourist may refresh himself under the shuddering roof. We would not enter either place, but straightway began our descent on the other side into the valley of what the guide-book calls "the infant Wye." It is a pretty valley when you climb down to it, but the way is by infrequent farms and past the furrowed flanks and hmnps of hopeless moorlands, where the heather, brown and blossomless at that season, gave the notion of the dense hides of monstrous pachy- derms. There were gushes of foamy waters in some of the furrows, and where the heather gave way to hillside pasturage rough-coated cattle grazed. There were few figures of our own species to lend human interest to the scene, but when we got to the river's level it was cheerful enough with cottages and the gateways of statelier dwell- ings withdrawn into their favorite seclusion. One of these dwellings, indeed, stood close upon the highway, the owner clutching fast his narrow space of freehold and refusing to yield it for any money to the great noble whose estate presses him close upon every side. It was a tenant of this noble who sold us the hospitality of his cottage near by, in the form of tea and bread and butter and the society of some friendly hens which gath- ered the crumbs at our feet in the porch where we ate and drank. The cottager and his wife were friendly, too, 217 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES and when their other guests were gone they let us look through the clean, homelike place. It was built for soUd shelter with walls three feet thick in the older part, but more windows in the newer. The kitchen was fitted with a good range and dresser, and the whole house looked comfortable if not cheerful; the kind young pair managed to live, and at the rent they paid for their moderate acre- age they will help the duke to live, too, now that the great nobles have been reduced to penury by having to pay their just share of the land tax. Near the cottage is a quaint stone bridge which looks conscious of being resorted to every summer by painters for purposes of landscape. One had come in a van, such as the English like to return to nature in, and had lived close to the bridge, as the van, which he left behind him, still attests. In the heart of the peaceful scene is a range of powder- mills, which we paid sixpence to pass on a private road; driving very gingerly, we got by them in safety and back to Buxton alive. VII That was the night we had in the lounge a concert, and one's heart was not wrung with pity of such humorous acting as we had the next night. What consoled even then was the admirable decorum of the English audience under the infliction of the head joker's jokes; when he came round, a smilingly and bowingly self-respectful figure, nobody withheld his dole. But it was awful to think, if some day the poor man should realize how dull he was, what would become of him. It would be possibly as if a writer of detective stories should come to a sense of where he was in the scale of being. The kind English' tolerance spares all such; or is it an insular insensibility to all differences in the good or bad which is not a moral 218 THE HUMAN INTEEEST OF BUXTON good or bad? So the English suffer for the bread of the cottage loaf unrepiningly when they could have French bread, and endure a climate of every vicissitude except dry and warm, when in their empire they have every beautiful weather under the sun to choose from. I continue to carp at the weather in Buxton, but if the truth must be told it was far better weather than we left at Boston the day we sailed ten days before, when we choked in the heat pushed seaward off the sweltering continent: a day following suddenly upon a June week of April cold. At least in Buxton you can get in out of the weather, but there was no escape from it in Boston. Yes, the English summer, as it is parcelled out in days glum or gay from hour to hour, but always green and full of the perfume and color of flowers and sweet with the song of birds, is not so bad as I paint it, and I dare say the winter is even better; it cannot be worse. As the next day woke raining, without even the delusory prelusive brightness, we decided finally to leave Dorothy Vernon to the chances of an elopement which we could not go to Haddon Hall all that way in the wet to cotmtenance. Our baggage was hand-carted down a few rods from the hotel to the station by one of those German emissaries, a gentle youth who was very glad of my little German, but not too glad, because it helped retard the English he was trying to learn. He complained that the hotel service was so largely composed of his compatriots that he had no chance at the language of the country. We were sorry for him, but it showed how Providence watches over British interests under the very infestation of their enemies, whom it baffles not by the confusion of tongues, but by the hope- less unity of their speech. The young porter seemed to understand an English shilling well enough and gratefully put our baggage into the van, where it instantly became luggage. The stations 15 219 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES of the Midland Railway and the London and Northwestern lie side by side in Buxton and our train lay between them. It seemed as if it would go up to the metropolis either way we said, but as we had booked by the London and North- western the guard who looked at our tickets decided it had better go by that line. SOME LAST DEOPS IN TUNBRIDGE WELLS SOME LAST DROPS IN TUNBRIDGE WELLS The healing springs of Great Britain are so abundant and so widely dispersed that nothing in the sad variety of pain incident to its inhabitants can well fail of relief. Except very signally at Strathpeffer, Scottish ground does not much contribute to the beneficent flow. It is mainly England that yields the waters which the Britons drank before the Romans, and the Romans before the Saxons, and the Danes before the Normans; but Wales also has her wells from which the Saxons may drink with physical improvement comparable to the pohtical advantage which the British Constitution has lately been deriving from Welsh sources. In its smaller Cambrian way, for in- stance, Llandrindod advances with Harrogate in public favor, and though not commended by the faculty for so many virtues as its Yorkshire superior, or resorted to in anything like the same measure, it takes its part in diverting the island suffering from the German Spas. In their patriotic efficacy both resorts may be regarded as mihtating against the German invasion, for we may be sure that those subtle Teutonic intelligences, which spy out the inferiority of the English Uver, stomach, nerves, and muscles, will not fail to turn their knowledge to military account when the Kaiser's armies make their landing through the cordon of Dreadnoughts guarding the white cliffs of Albion. 223 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES At Buxton we had already somewhat seen the revival of an English watering-place; and years before last year we had witnessed the resuscitation of Bath from the secular lapse of her importance as the resort of the aflBicted, though it was apparent that the fashionable world would never again throng her Pump Room. Bath must always remain of a unique charm for the sympathetic visitor, but for an atmosphere of faded gentility and a perfume of eighteenth-century literature Tunbridge Wells may meekly emulate the claims of Bath, as certainly she may more than halve the neglect of medicine with that mother of English Spas. No great London doctor will now say, "You must go to Bath," as he will say, "You must go to Harrogate," instantly, decisively, finally, or even with the same promptitude that he will say, "You must go to Llandrindod." He will not even dream of saying, "You must go to Tunbridge Wells," and I may as well relieve the reader's anxiety at once by owning that we went to Tunbridge Wells for our pleasure and not for our pain. We had been a month in London and everybody we knew in her seven millions had risen with the Houses and hurried away to kill pheasants or grouse. But we should have been very sorry, if we had been able, to kill either, and we arrived on an August afternoon when it had forgotten to rain in Tunbridge Wells with the pacific wish to find ourselves in the best hotel of the place with the least delay. It had not occurred to us that Tunbridge Wells could be full of anything but phantoms of the past, and we had not bespoken our rooms, trusting the memo- ries of Dr. Samuel Johnson and Mr. Samuel Richardson not to keep us out of the newer houses on Mount Ephraim, however inhospitably they might behave in the ancient inns on and about The Pantiles. That region has long 224 LAST DKOPS IN TUNBRIDGE WELLS been abandoned to the relaxing influences which now beset all low grounds in the English health resorts, though it must once have been thought bracing enough, for appar- ently there were no public houses on Mount Ephraim until the water of the place had practically ceased to compete with its air. The tale of Tunbridge Wells is soon told in that course from infirmity to fashion which all healing waters run. They were, to be sure, discovered by a dissipated noble- man, and so were destined to social distinction from the beginning; but the Romans had omitted to drink of them, and the unwashing Saxons, Danes, and Normans had left the ferruginous pools untroubled by bathing. Their genteel as well as their medical celebrity began in 1606 with the cure of Lord North, and may be supposed to have waned after the visits of George IV. in the first third of the last century, though the young Princess Victoria who was afterwards the Queen spent much of her youth there. In the meantime Queen Henrietta of Charles I. had visited the Wells, and the Queen of Charles II., that poor Catherine of Braganza whom her blackguard husband made suffer ills beyond the potency of their properties, abode there six weeks in "about forty tents" pitched on a neighboring down. Queen Anne, when Princess Anne of Denmark, gave a stone basin for the fount she frequented at Tunbridge and caused the walks to be paved with tiles, and so established them in the name of The Pantiles forever. I suppose it was the mystery of this name which deter- mined us for Tunbridge Wells rather than for some other watering-place when we were to leave London, for after we had once read Fanny Burney's Camilla we vowed ourselves to go some day and see what The Pantiles were and why. Not to leave the reader in overlong curiosity, I will say that the name relates to the complete tiling of the walks, as we might have imagined without coming. 225 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES We could equally have imagined without coming all those presences of fact and fiction with which The Pantiles were haunted. The great Dr. Johnson and the good Mr. Richardson; Camilla herself and her dear authoress, with that amusing buck or blade in the book who always profaned in "0 hang it, O curse it," and declared if he did not like a thing that he "could not patronize it"; the Duchess of Queensbury and the several female adorers of the lexicographer and the novelist as you see them in the well-known print, swelling down upon their idols in vast hoops and towering head-dresses; Mr. Harry Warrington out of The Virginians coming from play with the several wicked noblemen who had not much ado to mislead him, or going to the rooms of that worldly old wicked woman in whom the beautiful Beatrix Esmond had eventuated; the nameless notorieties of the earlier time observed by Coimt Hamilton when "all that is considered handsome and gallant in either sex resorts here in the water season . . . and everything breathes pleasure and joy; constraint is banished; intimacy is established at the first acquaint- ance"; we did really imagine something of all this, but I must own we were a whole week at the Wells and many times at The Pantiles without establishing a single intimacy. II It might have been our fault; I do not say it was not, for that confidence in the emptiness of the place which we had so rashly indulged had wellnigh left us to camp on the neighboring downs without Queen Catherine's provision of "about forty tents." To be turned away from a succession of hotels is really not personal, but when it continues indefinitely one begins to fancy demerit in one's self. When we came to the last hotel in Tunbridge 226 LAST DEOPS IN TUNBEIDGE WELLS Wells we suffered this shame the more keenly because we could not understand how a resort long since so abandoned should be so thronged that we could nowhere find shelter in it. But I have noted, in the course of many journeys and sojourns, that it is almost impossible not to arrive in places at the height of some other season when they are in the depths of their own season. Tunbridge Wells, which is no longer the refuge of the ailing, is largely that of the aging, who qualify for it, not by disease, but by financial competence, by sex, by celibacy or widowhood, and by the frequentation of many years. The super- abundance of these amiably senescent ladies ought to have been fully notified even to our careless intelHgences by the succession of Bath chairs lining the streets, but we rather took the chairs for a sign of emptiness and dis- occupation. However, when our rejection from the hotels convinced us of error, we set about the search for lodgings. We promptly found one apartment which we would not have, and another which would not have us; but a third with some hesitation and self-counsel accepted us, and in a moment almost we were settled in rooms. Our house was one of a stately half-score so familiarly swell-front that it seemed as if they must be facing on Louisburg Square in Boston, or on the Common in a stretch of Beacon Street. We tried to kindle the imagi- nation of our landlady by citing this fact to her, but, though- she was a landlady of unusual intelligence and had been educated to the scientific care of invalids, we failed to interest her in it. She so far conceived our mental make-up, however, as to show us the large drawing- room in which the Duchess of Wellington, then lodging in the house, heard the news of Waterloo; and what would we like for dinner, or as there was a very fine boiled ham coming off, would not we prefer meat-tea? Meat-tea we preferred, and while it was taking its time to come to 227 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES the table we explored that widely sloping expanse of gorse and heather which stretches between Mount Ephraim and the main town at Tunbridge Wells. It is a type of the patrimonial lands which once belonged to the Enghsh people in a vastness collectively equalling that of some ducal estate, if not surpassing the least of that sort. The practice of openly or clandestinely en- croaching upon such lands has immensely reduced their extent. The owners of adjacent private holdings have fenced in large areas of the commons, and when this was done there was formerly no recourse for the people who were too poor or too timid to contest the spoliation; but within the last fifty years it has been arrested by the Commons Preservation Society. If the reader cares to know how, in what outright English fashion both as to the robbing and from the robber rending his prey/ he may learn from Lord Eversley's "Story of the Battle during the last forty-five years for Public Rights over the Com- mons, Forests, and Foot-paths of England and Wales." It is a most interesting story, and I hope all Americans will feel a special pleasure in realizing that the founder of the society and the historian of it is the statesman who, when he was not yet Lord Eversley, but Mr. Shaw- Lef evre, carried through- the House of Commons the vote for the arbitration of the Alabama Claims, and so saved two kindred peoples from the bitterest war that could have been. Every part of the story is important, and if that part which records the struggle of the people's friends to help them hold their own in Berkhampsted Common from the invasion of Lord Brownlow is the most dramatic, it is no more important than others. It can concern us here only through my wish that any tourist I send to Tun- bridge Wells may feel the human interest, as well as the natural beauty of that stretch of gorse and heather which invited us away from the fine boiled ham just coming off. 228 LAST DEOPS IN TUNBRIDGE WELLS Gorse and heather I have said because it is safe to assign those tough growths to wellnigh any wild place in Britain, though on the Common at Tunbridge Wells it may have been neither that shrubbed the rugged ground and frayed out in the slanting and curving paths which our feet soon learned to know. The Common slopes irregularly between the whole upper and lower town, as I have said, and we climbed up or down whenever we went shopping or sight-seeing in the little city. It is actively illustrative both of the communal ownership and of the aggressions of private ownership which have mostly alienated the earth's children from their natural home. Here and there in, say, half a dozen places the land- robbing has gone on till the robbers have intrenched themselves too strongly to be ousted. They probably began by pitching their tents on the Common, but by subtle degrees the tents have changed to stone till one of the least is so formidable as to call itself Gibraltar. This is said to be garrisoned by invalid old ladies of a tempera- ment too stormy for an ordinary environment, and it is impregnable to the hardiest small boy of those that roam the Common in adventurous bands. The successors of other land-pirates are less defiantly lodged, and I suppose the spaces set off for tennis and cricket are appropriated to those pastimes by popular consent. On the borders of the Common is at least one tea-house which we found open on Sunday and responsive to our wish to have tea in its damp little garden. I judged from some small gatherings at night that the people's demesne was used for religious and political pur- poses. One night a minute socialist meeting overcame my after-dinner reluctance, and I went out to listen to the mildest arguments for collectivism by nothing redder than the flare of kerosene torches. One of the listeners asked some courteous questions of the speaker, who answered 229 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES in the gentlest terms; he promised to recur to the same points on the morrow evening, and then with his fellow- conspirators against society (another young man and a young woman) he struck his lurid flambeau and went away, perhaps more explicitly to plot the ruin of capitalism in secret. Ill We were very prompt the morning after our arrival in visiting the famous wells and in verifying The Pantiles. We found them both at the foot of a pleasant street of shops, which we reached by a path over the Common, in the shelter of so many spreading sycamores (I hope syca- mores, for it is a favorite tree of mine and is so character- istic of Old World promenades) that the tiles were in perfect preservation against the ardent sun which con- sumes so many things exposed to it in England. The Pantiles were obvious to the most casual glance, but we had some difficulty in identifying the Wells. At last we made out one of them in the keeping of the solitary dipper left of those required by the rules to ladle up the ferrugi- nous flnid till every invalid was filled with the gallon or so of it advised by the science of the time for his cure. She was an aged dipper wholly unlike the spry little Madchen who minister to your ills at the German Spas; and she was not to blame if her habitual disoccupation had tended to a bulk which we should have been loath to disturb. We exchanged with her a glance of question and self- denial, and then we passed on and left her to thronging ghosts in hoops and bag-wigs, out of society and fiction, who were waiting to repair the waste of a night of cards and wine. Then we pressed on over The Pantiles past the rows of glittering little shops, and under the leaves of the sycamores to the spread of penny, tuppenny, and thrup- 230 LAST DROPS IN TUNBRIDGE WELLS penny chairs beyond the band-stand. Other days we stayed to hear the band, but now we were going to see the exhibition of Tunbridge Wells pictures and antiques which had lately been opened over the forsaken Pump Room by something less than the usual allowance of local gentry. To be quite frank with that amiable exhibition, it was not so important as its well-wisher could have desired, but I do not say it was not worth the shilling (or was it sixpence?) admission fee. It is only fair to own that any civilization or condition of it comes to very little in the collections representing it to posterity. Greece and Rome, indeed, have done surprisingly well in antiquities, but that is because their life was so largely plastic; the commercial life, the business life of the modem world, has had no time for the creation and accumulation of monuments. After twenty minutes in the exhibition at Tunbridge Wells nothing remained for us but to loiter back over The Pantiles and yet more lingeringly climb the Common by one of its many wandering footways. The breath of Moimt Ephraim restored us and made us glad that in the relaxing air of the lower town we had had the courage to "book" seats on the char-^-banc for the beautiful ruin of Bayhem Abbey, some fourteen or fifteen miles away. It is only one of the many alluring excursions from Tunbridge Wells, and it was rather by chance than by choice that we took it; the booking-office, with the char-Sr-banc standing outside, determined us, and not a specific interest in that ruin above another. But we were never sorry that we chanced it; no lovelier drive could have rewarded far greater merit; the driver himself was indefinitely beyond our desert, which I tried to enhance at the end by a tip representing American prodigality. His white top-hat and his purple face were of the type dear to stage-coaching fiction; his aspirates 231 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES were exactly in the wrong places, and his manners, at once courteous and commanding, w^re of the best period. Mostly he was silent, but at moments he exploded in unexpected praise of the scenery. A wave of his whip indicated a signal bit of landscape; the fact that the fields bordering our way for ten or twelve miles were the property of a single nobleman seemed addressed to the Americans, who perhaps, more keenly than all his other passengers, felt the wrongs which the wicked Lloyd- George's budget was then about to inflict upon the holders of such vast tracts by making them pay their just share of the common taxes. If the nobleman's posses- sions had been ugly we could have borne it better, but the very beauty of this twelve or fourteen mile stretch of landscape made the justice of the tax appear more mon- strous. When we came to the exquisite ruin of Bayhem Abbey, which with miles around it belonged to a martyred marquis, we should have had no words for our sympathy if we had thought of the marquis. But our thoughts were all for the Abbey, with its Gothic frame so tidily kept from decay, with its towering fragments of arch and clustering columns and bits of long-drawn aisle and fretted vault, its breadths of greensward scrupulously clipped between the sinking or sunken walls of the cloister and the many offices which pertained to abbeys. It is no such ruin as Netley Abbey, and it is far from the vast glory of Fountains or the melancholy of Melrose, but it is a ruin full of self-respectful charm, and no friend of decay can afford to omit it from his affectionate resort. We were dismissed from our char-^-banc at the gate of the grounds and left to find our way to the Abbey on foot by a road rather long and over meadows rather wide. But we made bold to cross the pastures by a cow-path, and our example so far corrupted the rest of our company that everybody came back by the cow-path. They were 232 LAST DEOPS IN TUNBBIDGE WELLS a friendly lot who had nothing to say to us on the drive after some first civilities in letting us to our places, and I suppose they were as middle or as lower middle class as oinselves. We found our char-^-banc yet farther away than we had left it, for it had withdrawn to the village inn, through whose windows we could see many villagers sitting at colloquial ease behind mugs of beer. No reader of Hardy or of Phillpotts but must have wished to overhear their talk; it probably related to the game of cricket going on outside on the village green, ranked round with the leisure of both sexes and offering to the alien spectator an image of the Merrie England which in these days is restoring itself in so many games and dances and other pastimes under the threatening shadow of German invasion. We were so full of good will to it all that it was hard, at our tea-table in the garden of the inn, to have one of our companions seemingly less than worthy of our sympa- thy. Deceived, no doubt, by the perfection of my English accent, he said he wondered that so many precious relics were left lying about in show-places exposed to hordes of sight-seeing Yankees. I could not accept the implied flattery to myself at the cost of my country, and "Were we so predatory?" I asked, and then our companion was willing to hedge from the only aggression my patriot- ism ever suffered in England. He said he supposed he would not have felt as he did if he had not fallen into inhospitable Irish hands when he went to find work once in the States at a time of general adversity. He was not an unkind man, and he tacitly allowed us to make our peace with him. IV We were the more susceptible to this unmeant incivility from our fraternization of the day before with the driver 233 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES of the fly which we took for an excursion to Groombridge. The day was of a sunniness reflected in his shining face and cheery speech, and "You are Irish," I said, and he consented in gay tones that belied his sorrowful terms, "I come from that unfortunate country." I thought he would like my answering in like temper and I said, "We came from that other unfortunate country, America!" and he blithely rejoined, "The two runs together; what one says the other says," and in this recognition of our inter- national sohdarity we set off like step-brothers. But we were not very bitter about the English, who, we allowed, lived in a beautiful land, housed charmingly behind neat hedges and shining lawns or glowing bits of garden, or went harmlessly holidaying by us on bicycles or in motors. They are great pleasurers, those English, and as the alien idler sees them they seem to be always going on some joyous jaunt, with eating and drinking at the end of it. They have a climate that invites them to their outings; Providence seems unfailingly to watch over them with waterproofs and umbrellas, and their charming mansions and cottages are so bleak within that their shel- ter is to be shunned except in the wildest storm or the coldest frost. I am always carping at the cold of those houses, but there was scarcely one on the way to Groombridge which I did not covet. A good many of them were for sale, and I negotiated for all such, arranging to put in hot-air furnaces and steam-heating as a preliminary to possession. But when we reached Groombridge I instantly bought the whole place without condition, so sweetly did the little shops and houses irregularly fencing in the village green entreat one. As it was Bank Holiday, the shops were shut, but our driver knocked at the door of one, and the reluctant mother who came out softened more and more to our enthusiasm and would have sold us in the end more 234 LAST DKOPS IN TUNBEIDGE WELLS post-cards of Groombridge than we wanted; our driver even presented us with a colored one at his own expense. Our purchase of the place included not only the village and the club-house of the local hunt, but also the chapel built in 1625 and dedicated "to the happy return" of Charles I., then Prince of Wales, from his unsuccessful wooing of the Infanta of Spain; and I was the more insistent upon this because James Howell, a putative literary ancestor, was secretary to the Prince's expedition and wrote delightfully of his courtship in Madrid. After that I had barely enough left to buy the supreme attrac- tion of Groombridge, namely, the sympathetic prison in which the Duke of Orleans, taken at Agincourt, built himself during his sojourn in the manor-house of Richard Waller, the valiant English knight who had captured him under a heap of slaughtered Frenchmen. What this manor-house was like no post-card of Henry V.'s time records, but one of Edward VII.'s gives a good notion of the edifice with which the captive duke sup- planted it. It is not apparent from the guide-book (with two maps and illustrations, 9d.) why the duke was per- mitted to indulge in this architectural pastime, but the English knight may have felt it implied in Henry's charge to "take care of his prisoner," and it is certain he could not have done better than let the duke build that beautiful mansion. The sunshine seemed to melt upon the walls and roof and become part of their mellowness, and'7the pigeons that swelled and cooed up and down on the steep tiles were of one life with the flowers in the walled gardens below. The house is like many another English country- seat, I suppose, but with the precipitous slant of its roof it is also like a French chateau, and doubtless the captive duke solaced his homesick heart in studying that form. The moat that surrounds it may be of a charm common to the architecture of both countries; it took the sunshine 16 235 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES like the house and garden, and it was without the sugges- tion of mosquitoes which would qualify the charm if the place were reproduced entire on Long Island or New Jersey, as it may very well be some day. Our guide-book advised us, with other visitors, to "note the peacocks on the lawn before the house," and we tried to do so while scrupulously forbearing to "stray from the public way," but the peacocks were taking a holiday with the rest of us. We were richly recompensed for their absence by the presence of two young ladies who faltered in the garden path while two young men approached with lifting hats and apparently put some question justificative of their having "strayed from the public way." The inaudible but prettily visible parley lasted a few moments; then the young men backed away with lifting hats again, and the ladies went, not hurriedly, into the house. Presently the young men came out near us, where we had tried so hard to eavesdrop -their encounter with the ladies, and imlim- bered each an easel under an oak beside the moat and began to sketch the house; they must have been asking leave to do so. Happy youths they looked and enviable, and yet we had the better of them, for they could not put themselves into their pictures, and if they put the ladies alone it would want the poetry of the dramatic encounter which our memory of the scene would always keep. That was the supreme moment of our visit to Groom- bridge, and yet it was sweet, turning back to the point where we had left our fly, to pause by the shore of the stream which supplied the moat and share the patient disappointment of the anglers fishing its loath waters. They were men and boys who looked as though they were there by sufferance rather than by right and would have enjoyed their sport if they had caught anything. I hope that as it was they enjoyed their holiday; the fish in those 236 LAST DROPS IN TUNBEIDGE WELLS sluggish depths must have liked it. The sun came through the trees and was of such a tender English warmth that the anglers could bask without baking in it, and we could make our return through the shady avenue in that agreeable languor which is so much more com- patible with self-respect than the effect of our sweltering American heat. I do not offer excuses for not making any of the several other excursions from Tunbridge Wells which the guide- book suggested, but perhaps the reader will be able to forgive me if I allege the relaxing air of the place and the sufficiency of the local charm to our small enterprise. It was for us enough to go down into the pleasant town with its irregularly sloping and branching streets of shops and its neat rows of dwellings, with now and then its statelier mansions showing their garden foliage above their guardian walls. Quiet tramways purled through the principal ave- nues, and at nightfall the Salvation Army mustered its forces and held the Enemy at bay with fife and drum and with the shouting of the captains of both sexes in song. It seems always an odd way of winning heaven, but of course there were other ways in Tunbridge Wells which were apparently adequate to its people's material as well as spiritual wants. It is one of the hundreds of comely towns in England which seem designed by Providence for the declining years of half-pay and pensions of all sorts, and various types of small income. There are always a good many houses to let in such places, but there is no other sign of adversity. The houses which are occupied are scarcely more scrupu- lously kept, and if one were in any wise superannuated one could not wish for anything better than immediate 237 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES possession. The circumstances are those in which widows and maidens grow older and older indefinitely, and share in the mild amusements and amiable facihties without open envy or rivalry. I dare say they have both; that there are distinctions among them which are effaced among the men at their club. But to the stranger all appears one amicable color; to be quite honest, he scarcely sees any sign of life to judge the fact from. Do such people come out of their houses only after nightfall? The streets are busy with the people who are no people, tradesmen, and strangers like himself; cabs dearer than London cabs, butchers' carts, beasts and vehicles of burden, and more rarely a private carriage hurrying from pubUcity or standing before one of the competent shops which in every sort abound and even superabound. The amount of disoccupation in all ages and sexes which is the basis of the local prosperity is scarcely to be estimated; the members of the unemployed with adequate incomes in these English towns must far exceed that of the un- employed without incomes in the hardest of the hard times. Yet where do they keep themselves, hide them- selves from the prying, yet not antipathetic American eye, those half-paid, those pensioned, those superannuated, those gently related, those cultivated recluses? VI If it was our hope to take some of them unawares in the tasteful new theatre which would not be a tight fit for the gayety of Tunbridge Wells at the height of the season, whenever that was, our hope was disappointed. At the season when we were there, whether it was in or out of the season, the theatre hung loosely about a score of people in the orchestra and a hundred in the orchestra 238 LAST DEOPS IN TUNBRIDGE WELLS circle and the balcony; but the gallery swarmed with enthusiasts for the patriotic American drama which it was our curious chance to have come unknowingly to see. Few of us elect in the four-shilling seats were in evening dress, though some of the ladies had undressed into it in that duteous excess of d^collet^e which is the mark of breeding in Great Britain, and there was no dress else- where any more than if it were at Saratoga. A more robustly fearless American melodrama than that which so strangely happened that night at Tunbridge Wells could not have been given at Saratoga. There were moments of Revolutionary and Republican excess in that play which ought logically to have made the heavens fall through the roof upon us, but they only brought down the house in the gallery and the orchestra circle in storms of applause. The scene was in Phillipse Manor on the Hudson, and from first to last the daughter of the house, very beautiful, but a burning loyalist, was employed in promoting the American cause with every violence and artifice as applied to the discomfort of her Tory fiance. This miscreant, sometimes boldly wearing a red coat, in the midst of alarms from the American infantry or cavalry tramping or galloping to the door of the manor-house and more or less beating it in, was not nearly so offensive personally to us as the patriot lover whom the maiden of the manor secretly preferred and whom, when wounded, she held captive, but preserved from death that he might effect the triumph of our arms and marry her. All the treasonable sentiments, all the expressions of loyalty to General Washington and disloyalty to King George, roused the gallery to mad approval and left the orchestra in a torpid neutrality. For ourselves, we remained con- scious and ashamed, with a guilty feeling that we ought to explain to those sympathizers with rebellion that they were innocently abetting our separation from the mother- 239 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES country, but we had not the courage. We remained silent; we shared for different reasons the joy of the gallery in the butler of PhiUipse Manor who played an elderly darky in pure Cockney throughout and unremit- tingly abetted the estabhshment of American inde- pendence. THE CITY OF THE ROYAL PAVILION THE CITY OF THE ROYAL PAVILION Evert large town in Great Britain has its penny railway guide, which is framed as far as may be on the lines of the enduring Bradshaw. The large cities, like London, Liverpool, Manchester, and Edinburgh, have each an ABC guide which alphabetically instructs how and when to get away from it and how to get back, but indulges no vagaries as to other arrivals and departures at the objective point. We trusted the London A B C to bring us to Tun- bridge Wells, and we were not betrayed; we chose a hotel, with alternates, from it, and we could not blame it because all these hotels were full-up. But when it came to going, for instance, from Tunbridge Wells to Brighton, we were thrown, in our fear of the labyrinths of Bradshaw, upon the penny guide of the place. The reader will think it simple to choose between an express-train at 3.28 and a way-train at 3.45; and so we found it; but we chose the 3.45, without noticing the 3.28, and we knew nothing about that till the most amiable of porters got us a compartment in it. Then we cast about for our baggage, and it was nowhere to be seen, though it was of very visible bulk, and the porter began looking jnto the different vans for it, but finding it in none. )Ve 243 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES had sent it in good season by an out-porter with a hand- cart, and we blamed him severely, for the express-train would start in five minutes. Our railway porter ran to and fro, and climbed dizzy heights commanding views of other platforms, and at last discovered our trunks on the platform of the 3.45 train where we had ordered them to be delivered. It was now too late for it to be brought subterraneously across to us; guards were whistling ex- citedly, porters shouting, bells ringing; there was only a moment for getting out of our compartment and thanking and feeing our faithful porter, who instantly ran off and applied all his strength to the convex back of an old gentleman who was trying to leave the train, but whom he pushed into it, and shut the door upon as the express pulled away. It would have been some consolation to know why the old gentleman wished to leave the train at that moment, or why the porter would not let him. It would have been some relief to have indulged a habit of profanity, but we could not form that habit on the spur of the moment; we could only vent a helpless rage in some blank invectives, and we did not think to inquire about the old gentleman till some time afterwards. No doubt he was wrong, or the porter would not have pushed him back; and no doubt we were wrong, or we would have known about the 3.28, and the out-porter would have left our baggage in the right place for it. After all, we thought it no great hardship to be going by the 3.45. It could not be so very long getting to Brighton if the express got there in an hour, and we should see something of the junctions where we changed ; junctions are always so amusing. Another most amiable of porters told us, while he labelled our luggage, that there would be no change for an hour; he soothed our nerves with gentle condolence, and, as far as a just man might, he 344 THE CITY OF THE EOYAL PAVILION insinuated a pleasing censure of the out-porter for our blunder; the out-porter might have knoTvn about the 3.28; it almost came to that. I will always say that the English railway porters are the kindest men in the world; and if ever I am quite broken in spirit I shall wish to go and Uve among them, supporting my lacerated self-respect against their soothing respect, and letting them take my self-reproach away by the excuses they will suggest for my crimes, and my blunders worse than crimes. I am sure that this tranquilly labeling porter, who dabbed towards his cap with his paste-brush in acknowl- edging my tip, could not have known of the junctions beyond that first junction an hour off. We took it for granted that we should be well on the way to Brighton there, if there were others we need not mind; and if we were mistaken, what have we really to complain of now? In three or four hours we did at last reach Brighton by a train perhaps only normally behind time, and there was a great deal of excitement if not experience at all those junctions. If there was anything wanting, it was a want of tea, for the junctions were all strangely barren of refreshments; everywhere there were news-stands, but no lunch-counters. Everywhere there were crowds of impatient passengers, and everywhere patient authorities of high or low degree, who did not resent being asked the third or fourth time whether the next train would be our train; it did not matter that it never was. I will say, though, that the prevalence of junctions adds appreciably to the cost of travel in England. You must see that your luggage is taken out of the arriving and put into the departing van, and you must fee a porter for helping you do this. If he is the porter who takes charge of your hand-baggage, you cannot, for instance, make his fee less than a shilling, though I have heard that the English sometimes make it sixpence, and ladies threepence, and 245 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES widows and orphans no one knows how few farthings. Still, such is the home comfort, the almost Asiatic luxury, of an EngUsh porter who takes charge of your hand- baggage and your large luggage, and insures their going with you from junction to junction, that the money is well wasted; and my regret is not now for the wild profusion of that many-junctioned journey from Tunbridge Wells to Brighton. It is for the sad, sole instance in which a faithful fellow swiftly changed us and our belongings from train to train, and then ran along by our carriage while his wretched beneficiary searched every pocket for a piece of silver, however large or little, and found nothing, not a penny, in any pocket. We were obliged to shout the fact to the porter halting in the rear, and to cry him mercy; we had more need of it than he of money; but I knew not in what terms, if any, he granted it. The incident cast such a gloom over our spirits that we did not notice how dark it was outside when we reached Brighton — I ought to say the Brighton station, which is not only far from the tourist's or visitor's Brighton, but is itself of such extent that it seems as if you could not start from it with the reasonable hope of ever leaving it behind. Our porter, of the brave, kind lineage of all those other porters, found us a fly where there seemed to be no flies, and disinterred our trunks from the luggage of our train which had agglutinated other trains at the many junctions till it now stretched half across England, and the luggage from its vans moimted to the skies. I do not know how he knew our trunks; perhaps it was through the unerring divination of porters, who must read it from the owner's anxious physiognomy; or perhaps in this case he discerned its American character. When he had im- possibly put it on our fly, and the driver had roused his aged and ailing horse from what looked like coma, the horse di4 not fall motionless in his tracks, as we feared, ?46 THE CITY or THE ROYAL PAVILION but broke into a galvanic gallop, quite of his own initiative, and after long passages of time and space, through sub- urban and urban streets and avenues, brought us suddenly upon the shining stretches of the Brighton beach, with resplendent piers flung glittering out over the sea, and hotels rising height upon height and flaming to the stars. At almost the proudest of these we stopped, and were welcomed by the head porter and his imderlings, from whom we tried to hide our shame for the small sum we paid for our fly, and more especially for the massive brass-bound wooden trunk which when we bought it in Boston had not looked the crude, cruel, American thing it now appeared. II According to precedent at Tunbridge Wells we ought to have been turned away to roam the night; but we had wired for rooms, and we had got back a reassuring wire, and almost before the lady in the office was able to give us our keys we were in our seaward bowers, looking out on the black water which mingled the solemn voice of its surges with the bursts of ragtime revelry from the piers and the incessant clatter of heels and hoofs on the promenades. There was no time to wonder in which nearest shadow our fly-horse, his duty heroically done, had fallen dead; dinner, a placard in the passage to the dining- room had warned us, was over at eight, and it was now half past. When we pushed in, however, we found our- selves in the gentle keeping of those inimical German waiters who lurk everywhere in England to betray her as soon as they have learned the language; other people were dining round us at leisure, and when our own diimer was served it showed no resentment of our delay in the luke- warm flavors which characterize a belated dinner in American hotels. 247 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES At once that winning note of personal consideration was struck which welcomes the guest of the English hotel. It was there for us, that hotel, not we for it; and it urbanely accepted our tacit excuses for our retarded train; it as tacitly begged us not to mind; it was nothing; it often happened; and would we have thick soup or clear? If we hurried the meal it was quite our own affair, but, as a matter of fact, we did hurry; for we had a passion for Pierrots, which we fancied we could satisfy on those piers burning out over the sea and sending back bursts of music and applause. Pierrots had been our passion ever since we had seen the prince of them at Llandudno six years before; I could not prove he was the prince; but they are all of a sovereign delight, for there is something in the human face when painted white hke a wall, and roofed with a black, white-tufted skull-cap, and something in the human figure when widely trousered in white, and black- ttifted down the middle of a jacket reaching to the knees, which takes the heart with transport. All the EngHsh love those engaging creatures, and have them everywhere, so that we grieved and wondered not to come upon any of them that year till late in September, when we found a band of them under the Leas at Folkestone, where, helping form their audience of seven, we found much of their pleasantry confidentially addressed to us. Now, when we were making so sure of them at Brighton, suddenly the music and the applause at the pier-end ceased; the lights there began to fade, and the people, gorged with the joy of Pierrots, by us untasted, streamed densely landward and joined the throngs pacing the beaches and the shore-side promenades. We made what we could of the sound of street-singing at a corner; we walked up into agreeable squares and gardened places, where on the steps and pavements before large, old, friendly, late-Georgian houses people of both sexes were 248 THE OITY OF THE ROYAL PAVILION talking and laughing under the soft night, and perhaps flirting, and tried to assuage our disappointment in won- dering, since these mansions seemed devoted to Private Board, just what PubUc Board might be. It is a question which teases the inquiring mind in all the summer resorts (you must really say watering-places) of that Happy Isle, and we returned with it unanswered to our hotel, where we found again in the porch the old couple we had left there. They seemed country folk of some simple kind, and we made believe they did not know they were in Brighton out of season, which we more proudly knew. We wished we knew them, but the social improprie- ties forbade, and we left them silently looking at the crowds passing by on the hither and the thither side- walks. In our sophistication we recognized it for a lower middle- class crowd, mainly cockney, which was there for over a Sunday of the non-season. The season at Brighton, as I need not tell the polite reader, is now in the autumn, when people who are really people are there in the keeping of their houses or hotels, or carriages or motors, as real people are everywhere when they come for their pleasure. The autumnal season lasts into the early winter, and an examination of Who's Who will prove that many persons of distinction, if not rank, live at Brighton the year round, or that segment of its circle which the EngUsh spare to their home life from their sojourns in Italy, Norway, Switzerland, and the south of France. I had a fancy that I would like to live there myself, not only in those agree- able squares and gardened places, but in many tall, wide, old early-nineteenth-century houses along the sea-front. The residential town has, after the perverse manner of towns, grown quite in the other direction from these mansions; but I hold firmly to them; the villas of Hove are not nearly so sympathetic, and I do not believe the 249 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES rents are so low; at any rate, not half so many of the houses are to let. Ill The next morning it was Sunday, and, though it was the non-season, the people who thronged the sea-front lawns and paths of Hove looked so much like society people that they might almost have been a detachment of the Hyde Park church-parade, now so largely disbanded. I venture the conjecture timidly, ready instantly to take it back; but I am firm as to the lower middle-class crowd which swarmed past the hotels and down upon the beaches and upon the piers, and seemed to have thickened over- night to twice their mass, and to be momently thickening. Atlantic City is the only American standard of com- parison for the English watering-places which I know of, and only at Easter does Atlantic City rival them. What these masses did in order to enjoy themselves one could not very well ask them, but to be away from work in lover-pairs is perhaps pleasure enough between sixteen and twenty-five, and to have come off with the children anywhere from home is sufiicient holiday for fathers and mothers under forty. There seemed to be things doing on the piers; there were rowboats and sailboats off the beaches, which were themselves a distraction, with their surges and their sands, and their donkeys and bathing- machines. Not alone were the drinking-places open; there were many and many eating-places where the hungry as well as the thirsty might stay themselves. But, be- sides, there was a provision, novel to me, for picnickers who wished to spend the day in a semblance of seaside cottagers. A long stretch of the front where it began to be low cliffs was built up with rooms comfortably fur- nished, which could be taken for the day, and the young 250 THE CITY OF THE ROYAL PAVILION children put to sleep on couches in them, while the father wandered off with the elder, and the mother spread the table with lunch and waited his return at the door, so that he might know it from the hundreds of other rooms just like it. It was all very simply English and home- like, and I could think of many things less charming than these kindly sojourns, with their outlook on the thickly peopled beach, the sociable surges and inviting pleasure- boats, with a gentle electric tram ambling over the roof to and from the Municipal Aquarium. We ourselves went to the Aquarium, but I do not know that I should urge it upon the reader. It seemed to us that we had seen all those fish before, or else fish like them; and perhaps we went to the Aquarium because it was open on Sunday, and the famous Pavilion of George IV. was closed to visitors. It was the wish to see this Pavilion and not the Aquarium which brought us to Brighton. At another season we might have seen fashion, or that outside of it which is the best of it, perhaps; but in August this was not possible. Besides the Aquarium, which I would not decry, the town does not offer much to polite curiosity except the Pavilion. We did, indeed, desperately drive around the parks and gardens, including Preston Park, where, when it was Preston Manor, Anne of Cleves, the last wife whom Henry VIII. divorced, dwelt serenely forgetful of him, and comfortably ignorant of the fact that if she were living now she could not be presented at Court. It cannot be denied that these pleasures enhance the charm of a metropolis of gayety which, even when it is not gay, is something charming, like a dull, reposeful woman, who at least does not bother. Quiet streets, npt noticeably reverberant of the leisurely trams; Sunday-shut and silenced shops; large residences facing somewhat sombrely on the squares, unmindful of their statues and fountains; little houses ranging down the side- 17 251 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES streets, as if with the self-respectful English subservience, in attendance on those mansions; over all the English sky, irresolute between sun and rain: surely it is not bad; surely it is rather good. Everything is in order and in repair; without our striving of demohtion and destruction, there is evidence of recent growth; and there is some history, though not much, lurking in the backgroimd: with Romans, of course, and Saxons and Normans; Brighton is not far from Hastings, where the great battle was lost and won which made England; and there is record of French descents upon her beaches to burn and pillage early in the long wars between the two nations. Some French people are still to be seen and heard there, but they are as peaceable as so many Americans, and may have come over to revere the monument to the Sussex men who fell in the Boer War, or to see the very good loan collection of English pictures in the Gallery or the two thousand pieces of English pottery in the Museum, as we did. IV Much more likely, however, they have come to wonder at the Royal Pavilion, as we had, and to feel that in its wild architectural unreason it has still a sort of logic that pulls it together and gives it unity. It stands very low upon perfectly flat ground, and even so long ago as William IV. 's time was so shut round from the sea by other buildings that neither that monarch nor Queen Victoria cared to sojourn in it. But when once it leaves the sward it bubbles and spires up in domes and minarets and steeples from roofs resting on fantastic Moorish arches, and leaves the spectator free to say whether it is more Russian or Chinese or Saracenic in that strange feeling for the bizarre which is its unifying motive. It 252 THE CITY OF THE ROYAL PAVILION had an architect, of course — the well-known Nash of bold invention, who must have imagined it, but whom one does not clearly distinguish from the jnaster he served. It was first built for George IV. when he was Prince of Wales by another architect, but it was Nash who, quarter of a century later, remodelled it to its present effect for the King, and it is of the King only that one thinks in its presence. Upon the whole I did not find myself disposed to grudge him the entire satisfaction which it must have given his lawless soul. In such an abode alone could such a man house himself to his full comfort, and I will not blame him, for it seems to me that he has had blame enough. All royalties, I am afraid, have a bad time from their birth, and it is not strange that they turn out such black- guards as they often do; it is strange that they ever turn out as well as they sometimes do, poor things. When one considers the preposterous nature of their training for a station no man ever has a right to hold, one must forgive them very much; one must be at least as tender of them as of their subjects, who are responsible for the false position to which a prince is born and bred, especially if he is to be a limited monarch, with the apparent power of a despot over their persons and purses, but mortifyingly snubbed by the constitutional restraints. From the imiversity of illusion and delusion which the kingship is and always has been, such a prince as George IV. could be graduated only by excelling in badness. If he had been born plain and dull and true he could scarcely have helped being spoiled, but as he was bom beautiful and charming and false, he had no chance for his life; and I think it hard he should be blamed for being what he could not help becoming. He was doomed to be a liar, a drunkard, a glutton, and men and women joined him in carrying out the sentence which was scarcely self- 253 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES imposed. He had to put on debt as he had to put on fat; and it was not so meritorious of the people to pay his debts, though much has been made of it. After he had married one woman to please himself, as most other men do, he was forced to marry another woman to please the State, and it has been counted against him that he was brutal to his second wife. He was certainly wrong in that, but he had his excuse if not justification in her personal uncleanliness, her flirting, and her other follies. Standing in his Pavilion at Brighton, one could not wonder at his putting her as far from him in it as he could; and if he was fond of horses, I did not object, he being what he was, that he should "A stately palace dome decree" for their subterranean housing, which has since been built up and over into a "noble assembly and concert ^^hall." He pleased himself with interiors as fantastic as the out- side of his Pavilion, and there is a Chinese Corridor, with music-rooms and banqueting-rooms, dining-rooms, royal apartments, all in a mixed Oriental taste and of a gorgeous- ness which I did not grudge his shade. Rather it hurt me that among other objects in the Gallery there should be certain caricatures of him in the brutal fashion of the time, and even more it grieved me that his wife, Mrs. Fitzherbert, should be savagely mocked in one of them as if she were not his wife: I think it showed her borne away by the Evil One. Upon the whole, if one likes Brighton (and I did for reasons not quite given), one must thank George IV. for one's pleasure. To be sure, Brighton was discovered, as it were, by the famous Dr. Russell, who proclaimed one day to the early-eighteenth-century world that the sea- bathing there would be very good for ailing lords and 254 THE CITY OF THE KOTAL PAVILIOlSr commons, and upon whose reports numbers of sick dukes promptly resorted thither, whether to their advantage or not I cannot say; but they brought fashion in their train. The place seems never to have had the charm of Bath, or even of Tunbridge Wells, but it was no doubt very gay, or George IV., as Prince of Wales, would never have come to give it the stamp of his supreme approval. He discovered that it was good even for well people, and not only the Royal Pavilion, but Brighton itself, remains his monument. A great American millionaire, whose love of horses is an honor to his coimtry, had of late years run, if not driven, a tally-ho coach between London and Brighton in continuance of venerable tradition. We preferred, however, the swift train which makes the fifty miles in one hour instead of five; but I do not know why we pre- ferred the Pullman car on it to any first-class English carriage. Perhaps we were homesick, and wished to repatriate ourselves in that supreme image of American travel. But now, being at home, I have the heart to say that an English carriage is incomparably more comfort- able than the Pullman car, which the English have adapted to their own notions, but still left irreparably Pullman. Yet I do not know why I grumble at it, for, though we had bought chairs in it, we spent all but a few minutes in the restaurant-car waiting for our two-and-six luncheon. This was very good when it came, though long despaired of, and our wait for it gave u? time and oppor- tunity for the acquaintance of a fellow-traveller who presently betrayed that he had been in the States, and had had the time of his life there. It was a piece of most smiling good fortune to meet such a friendly spirit, and his talk made it seem much less than an hour to London. When we had parted from him there, he came hurrying back to our aid on the station platform, where we stood 255 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES waiting to choose our baggage from the successive vans, and entreated us to let him be of use; everybody in the States had been so kind to him. It made me glad, and I tried to think of some favor I could ask him, but I had to allege my long experience of English travel in denying his help. Yet when such things can happen, what may we not hope from International Arbitration? THE WATEES OP BLACKPOOL THE WATERS OF BLACKPOOL Whenever we said we were going to Blackpool, it seemed to fill our English friends with surprise and pleasure. They asked why were we going to Blackpool, and when we tried to say they laughed the more. We could not believe ourselves that we were going, or that we were really there when we arrived. We were, in fact, so high in the social scale through our friendships that we might never have heard of it if it had not been for one of the most liberal of our acquaintance who had noted some years before our interest in the popular crowd at Llan- dudno, and told us we ought to see Blackpool. He tried to enlighten our dense superiority by explaining that Blackpool was the seaside resort beyond Liverpool of the whole cotton-spinning and iron-casting country, and that masters and men alike thronged it in the season, the masters lavishing their gains and the men their earnings in one mad month or wild week of unstinted gayety. The men, he said, would save through the whole year, and then at the holiday time would take their hoarded fifteen or twenty pounds and blow them in there on themselves and families. He left us with a longing for the sight of their ingenuous profusion, which we had now come to appease, though he was charier as to the masters and as to their spending; perhaps because he knew less about them, or perhaps because he knew that I cared less for masters than men, whether at work or at play. In the eventual 259 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES phantasmagory of the place, I had no great effect from their longer sojourn in villa or cottage, though I do not say that such housings were not as fine as they are at our own seasides; I say merely that I did not notice them. Perhaps I did not know where to look for them; some aristocratic quarter of Blackpool there must have been, and I offer my excuses to it. We arrived there on an August Saturday when a hun- dred and sixty special trains brought their passengers from the whole North country for the week-end or the week following. But we had come almost immediately from Brighton, and of course there was a contrast; for one thing, there is no Royal Pavilion of George IV.'s fancy at Blackpool. It is very, very modern, Blackpool is, and, if it has any historical associations, I am not aware of them; though I do not say that Mary, Queen of Scots, for instance, was not once captured or imprisoned there, and I cannot deny that a great Cromwellian battle was fought at Prestonpans not far away, and the RoyaUsts very acceptably beaten. I am mortified that I cannot offer more serious information than this, and I fall back shamefacedly enough upon the small personal experiences which readers of travel really care more for. The smallest of these were the rooms given us at the hotel which the manageress showed us with a polite regret, which did not somehow enlarge them. They were about the size of the state-rooms we had on the steamer coming over, or of the bedrooms in Pompeii, which they might have been studied from by the architects accompanying the Roman legions in their invasion of Britain; but they had an inexorable claim upon us in the fact that they 260 THE WATERS OF BLACKPOOL were the only rooms left in the hotel when we wired. They proved good rooms to sleep in, and the hotel proved so good in every way that we were finally glad of them, if not proud of them. At the worst they showed the con- gested state of that Blackpool of the master class which we were destined otherwise to see so little of. The hotel stood back of wide lawns, not so much broken by flower-beds as to be unfit for bowls and tennis; Biblical games, apparently, for they were played almost exclusively by the Hebrew guests, whose race is not inhumanly shut from the summer hotels in England as it is from ours. The chairs on these lawns commanded vast prospects of the quays which stretched north and south as inimitably as the sea in front of them, or as the beaches between where all day long, from early breakfast-time to late bed- time, paddlers of every age and sex were countlessly paddling. If I seem to make light of the paddling, I am wrong, for it was really very charming to see, espe- cially as practised by children in the care of nurses and parents, who made them the excuse for baring their own legs to the winds and waves. I especially liked the kind young fathers who came earliest with their families, to let some wade in the gentle surf of the shelving shore, and others gallop up and down over the beach on ponies or donkeys, while their dogs barked round and bit, in their joyous riot, both surf and sand. Such families, I took it from the ponies and donkeys, were of the master class, but there was room enough on those immense margins for a whole world of the man class. Really one could not exaggerate the stretch of those margins by drawing the longest bow; and I do not know whether the extent seemed largened or lessened by the wide piers carried far out to sea and jointed, as it were, at two or three intervals with pavilions, for dancing or acting, or both. When they came to an end at last, their ends were bounced about by 261 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES pleasure-craft, steam and sail; notably, in one case, by a passenger-steamer always coming from or going to the Isle of Man, which kept itself out of sight somewhere in the offing. The people who debarked from this boat had so little the air of having had a smooth trip that I won- dered at the courage of those who promptly embarked as she seasickeningly rose and sank at the pier-head. II But it is not the shipping that most or at all impresses the visitor at Blackpool; it is the myriads of other visitors. Figures could as easily lie about their numbers by understating as by overstating them, and whether you were a spectator of the throng or an infinitesimal particle of it the multitude was always astounding. Before this, in writing of English things, I have had occasion to intimate that many of them afford exercise for that modesty which is always really the heart of American brag. Whether the scale in England is so small generally that any variation from it seems prodigious, or whether the things are really great, I am not ready to say; but in that little island there are certainly things that impress one as great. I suppose that there is no Niagara Falls there, no Mammoth Cave, no Yosemite, no Pike's Peak, no Metropolitan Tower, Lake Superior, no Chicago Stock- yards; and yet there are things in all these sorts which strike you as worthy of comparison. Besides, there are certain positive wonders, natural and artificial, which, there is no disputing, are more marvellous than anything of the kind that we have. London, for example, un- questionably outdoes any city of ours. New York is a large town, but New York, except for her high grade of intelligence, could easily be lost in London. The only 262 THE WATERS OP BLACKPOOL thing in which we excel England beyond parallel and peradventure is the spectacular purity of our municipal administrations and our freedom from graft in civic affairs. If you come, however, to something like the crowd on the promenade at Blackpool, you have several other English crowds to compare it with. You have the crowds at Folkestone, at Margate, at Brighton, which, although they are vastly smaller, are so much larger than any American seaside crowds that there is no talking, in the same breath, except of Atlantic City alone at Easter-time. If you are there then, at that point where the myriads of the Board Walk thicken for a conscious moment under the eye of the camera scanning it for a postal-card photo- graph, you can have some notion of the crowd forever writhing, forever worming, squirming, up and down at Blackpool. From a chair in the hotel garden it looked like some immeasurable organism, some monster of the geologic prime, never still, but creeping with one side this way and the other that. Near by it resolved itself into men, women, and children; farther off it was mere human mass with those opposite bilateral movements which I have tried to suggest, and there were miles of it. Dreadful enough to look at, the mammoth mass became terrible when you fused yourself in its bulk. It seemed the same in bulk by night and by day; it must have slept some- time, perhaps not in bulk, but in detail, each atom that sank away to slumber replaced by another atom fresh for the vigil ; or if it slept in bulk it was in some somnambulent sort, with the sense of a bad dream, a writhing and twisting nightmare. It was always awful to look upon, but awful- est at high noon, when it had swollen to its hugest, and was imaginably famishing for lunch with the hunger of some consuming insect horde. Possibly I am exaggerating in the impression I am trying to give of the Blackpool crowd. Doubtless any 263 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES happy couple, nearly wed or newly wed, of those that abounded in the mass could prove me grotesquely mis- taken, if not wilfully false. They could say that they had the time of their lives that day at Blackpool, and would ask nothing better than to repeat their transport. I admit this, and yet I do not allow that there were oysters enough for that mammoth organism in common, or in severalty, if it became hungry all at once, and turned upon the oyster-tables which chiefly offered to stay the collective famine. There were, of course, other things to eat along those endless quays and in the restau- rants that fronted on them, but oysters prevailed out of comparison with other provisions; oysters always in the shell, after the sole English fashion of eating them, and never in any of the American variants of fry or broil or stew. I suppose that if the oyster-shells of Blackpool were cast in one heap the cairn would moimt to the skies, but a tardy respect for precision obliges me to say that I saw no such monument. Ill I have an impression of the bathing at Blackpool as quite disproportionate to the paddling. For one thing it must be more expensive; where one can afford to bathe a thousand may paddle at no cost. Still there were no doubt bathers and bathing-machines; but I suspect that the iimumerable majority resort to Blackpool for the sea- air rather than for the sea-water. Even the sea-air the most of the majority take very mediately on the streets that stretch back from the quays or behind them, where in thousands and thousands of little stone houses the majority seem to lodge. In the glare of our Sunday after- noon, which was a very hot glare in these streets, we 264 THE WATEES OF BLACKPOOL passed miles of such little houses, and saw their front steps and the seats of their narrow garden door-yards full of their drowsing lodgers. The men were often frankly asleep, the women and even the children were not very alert, and, if not bound in a Sabbath slimiber, were sub- dued by lunch to a sympathetic silence. It is said that they oftenest bring their provisions with them for the few days of their stay, and the houses are strictly their lodging; but nearer the sea the houses were evidently for board as well as lodging, as we might see through the windows of their parlors by the tables set so close that the windows themselves had each a table conspicuously in it. One such was offered to our courageous inquiry for afternoon tea, and I am sorry now that our courage did not hold out so far as taking it, but at the time it seemed too conspicuous even for Americans. Of course we wondered, or at least we said we wondered, why all those poor souls should have come to Blackpool for what we could see of their pleasure, but a little reflec- tion ought to have taught us to moderate our amazement. People even so wrong-headed as we like to think the English average do not take their year's savings in one hand and their families in the other and hurry summer after summer for one hot week on or behind those sands out of mere midsiunmer madness. Perhaps if we had seen the towns and the houses which they lived in the rest of the year we might have found their joy (it did not look much like joy, though) in their Blackpool sojourn more justifiable than it appeared. I am afraid we did not consider, either, the gratification of their natural pride in being in Blackpool, and of meeting people they knew there, whom afterwards they could exchange reminiscences with, and remind of the splendid times they had there together. Above all, I suspect we did not think of the people they did not meet there, for one reason or another, and whom 265 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES they could tell that they ought to have been there, and have the more pleasure in telling that because they knew these poorer people were not able to come, either because they had not been able to save the money for the outing, or because they had lived so lavishly the whole year that they found themselves with nothing to waste on the holiday. At the very worst, their sojourn would be lovelier in the retrospect than in the aspect, and they could recall it with ever-increasing belief in its iridescence, as they began putting shilling with shilling and pound with pound for the next summer's outing. The case has its pathos, which I cannot hope to realize to the millionaire imagination of most of my readers, but I trust there is here and there some one poor enough to understand. I could well have wished to know more of the well- behaved and decent-looking folks within doors and with- out, in all those hot, uncomfortable, but not uncleanly streets, and I am tempted to make up things about them; but perhaps I had better not. In the thoroughfares paralleling the sea-front or leading to it there were trams, but in most of the streets there was nothing to meet the eye or distract the mind from the steady glare. We passed some chapels in which there seemed to be afternoon services; towards the end of our ramble there came stream- ing tides of people from the quay for the inflexible English rite of afternoon tea; detached atoms of the organism which they left writhing up and down beside the sea, insensible of their defection. Besides chapel and tea there seemed no other entertainment for those kind, dull- looking masses. In Blackpool on the esplanade there is a Winter Garden, there is a Ferris Wheel and an Eiffel Tower, with several variety theatres and a mighty ball- room; but all these were fast locked on our Sunday; there was only the sea with its piers and quays, and even on the piers there was none of that dancing which it is said "you 266 THE WATEKS OF BLACKPOOL ought to see" at Blackpool, not because you ought not to see it, but because it is so inoffensively typical of the place and people. Something of it we did see on our Saturday night in an enclosure on one of the piers; but I cannot say it was worth going to Blackpool to see. In other enclosures there was roller-skating, such as we may see even in New York, though there in Blackpool, under the electric glitter, it had a peculiar distinction, as the skaters rose and sank on the switchback inclines, and the girls flitted by, with the tilt of pretty ships, so swiftly that we could not say they were not pretty girls. Perhaps some of them were, and all were young and looked glad. There were shops on those piers, and there were vaude- ville shows which tempted us within, but could not keep us there; there was not a Pierrot in any, though at several they were promised; and the actors were of the artistic quality of the "entertainers" who haunt the summer hotels in England and make one glad it is not always May; or June, July, or August, for that matter. IV It was much better on the beach below at night, where " there were sermons in the dusky flare of kerosene-torches and oysters in the like illumination. That is, there must have been oysters, for there were oysters everywhere else; and there were other things to eat, like fruit and the very bilious-looking pink-and-yellow "sweets" of the island. There were people listening and eating, and large and little groups talking together on the sands. There were chil- dren far too yoimg to be up so late, but who would remem- ber the unwise indulgence of their elders as the supreme joy of their lives — ^if they lived. These merrymakers, if 18 267 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES it was merry they were making, were of the sort who must go home to bed in those close back-streets which we had found so hot in the afternoon; and no wonder they waited for the tide and the night to be at full before they left the pleasant sands. I should not have blamed them if they had stayed up till morning there. It was their chance to feel the mystery and the beauty of the sea and the dark, one of those priceless moments which outvalue whole lifetimes of common experience. Poor, ordinary fellow men and women, how few such moments could come to them even at Blackpool, the sole romance of their workaday year, on which they did well to lavish the savings from their hard earnings! In spite of their waste- fulness it must have been much to them that they could have so much of that joy for nothing. The morning held no promise of better things for them; they could make themselves part of the monster organism writhing up and down the quays, or they could take a tram that went north or a tram that went south; but a tram would cost money. No, the day would mock them with their poverty of resource; at the best it could only invite them to sit on the different levels of the higher or lower walks along the sea-front, and there they would be crowded and tired. The night beside the sea could alone give them room and rest. Even under cover of the dark I had not the courage to ask any of them if it were not so. I knew very well they would be glad to say, or to talk on any terms, those fathers and mothers of families, if only to contradict one another in the report of their common opinions and emotions. But travel is mostly a waste of opportunity. You meet innumerable people who would eagerly tell you their lives or analyze their characters to you, if you would offer them the chance by the slightest question, and yet you pass them dumbly by while inwardly you are hunger- 268 THE WATERS OF BLACKPOOL ing and thirsting to know about them. How rich I might have made this page if, when we venturously formed part of the organism on the quay, I could have asked some elbow neighbor what he was when he was at home, and how long he was going to stay, and how he hked it; and was that lady with him his wife; and how many were they in family. He might not have responded in the same ingenuous spirit, but I think he would. How the social world at Blackpool was probably made up I did indeed infer from the family in our railway- carriage as we came. They were people of third-class tickets who, as often happens in England, had been put in a better compartment because there were no third- class places left for them; but they were very acceptable society. They were from a small town oflf the line, and were village folk of serious mind in the elderly father and mother, of gay expectation in the young girl, their daugh- ter, and irrepressible greed in the small boy, their son. They were richly provisioned for the journey, and from time to time they all ate from their basket; except the boy, who ate all the time, when he was not rushing from the train to seize upon his father and keep him, with tears and cries, from being left at the different stations where he got out to look about him. The girl was very pretty, but when she smiled she showed that sad defect of the vanished or vanishing teeth which so early forsake the mouths of lower middle-class English youth. But she looked kind and good, and when she became that night one of the little ships that rose and sank on the waves of the skating-rinks on the piers, no spectator would have been the wiser or the sadder for her loss, if she smiled with her lips shut. I had not the courage to ask my fellow-atoms in the organism on the quay who and what and why they were, and I had still less courage to put any like questions to 269 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES the people in the hotel in whom I imagined such Blackpool quality as the master class might have. Very probably they were passing strangers like ourselves. One of them who sat next our table, and who talked willingly, turned out a young Irish business man settled in Birmingham; others, sitting in the garden chairs, with their hats and cigars at American slants, talked vigorously together on business matters and might easily have mistaken them- selves for my fellow-countrymen. In fact, the provincial English business man often makes you think of home when you meet him in the North. As I saw him now at Black- pool I never learned whether he was there for his summer holidays or had merely taken a day off and come because it was Aviation Week. This attraction had not drawn our own wandering steps; we had come to Blackpool for Blackpool, but when we found that it was Aviation Week we were so far from sorry that we set off on the top of the first tram after lunch for the field of the flying, which was inland from the south- ward beach. The reader to whom I have confessed myself so ignorant of the human facts of Blackpool need not dread my trying to make it up to him by telling of the aviation, though it was then more the novelty and less the bore that it now is. When, as we drew towards the field on our tram-top, and casually caught sight of one of the machines wheeling high in air, we thought it was one of the familiar half-tones in the illustrated papers; it had scarcely a moment's surprise for us. It was better, I will allow, in the flying-field, where as the biplanes and mono- planes were wheeled out on the grass they were made each, after a delay of poignant doubt, to rise from a run into a flight and then to mount the steeps of space and whir and wheel away. One of them quite refused to leave the ground and had to be taken off the field, but the others, with the shuddering sound of planing-mills, which 270 THE WATERS OF BLACKPOOL seems their contribution to the noise of a noise-maddened world, and is such an earnest of horrors to come, flew satisfactorily enough, with that present loss of interest for the spectator which I have noted. Probably if we could really see a miracle it would not have the charm of an every-day occurrence. In a world full of the common- places of steamboats, locomotives, and automobiles, the flying-machines could scarcely push their way without bringing the sense of something essentially uninteresting. I except from this sweeping censure, however, the graceful monoplane, which when it got up and away looked pleas- ingly like a mammoth dragon-fly, and not so much like a half-tone illustration. Our tickets to the ground admitted us to the lottery by which we might draw the prize of going up with one of the aviators. It was our dread of this terrific piece of luck which drove us prematurely from the scene, and sent us hurrying back to our hotel at no greater height than a tram-top. EXPERIENCES OP A TRUE BACONIAN IN SHAKESPEARE'S TOWN EXPERIENCES OF A TRUE BACONIAN IN SHAKESPEARE'S TOWN As a firm, and even violent, supporter of the Baconian theory of the Shakespeare authorship I approached Strat- ford-on-Avon with buoyant expectations of pleasure from my doctrine there mixed with fond regrets for the excellent hotel we had left in Leamington. I had dismissed the lingering fear of being obliged to change cars which had beset me to the very suburbs of the town, and I could freely abandon myself to the emotions proper to the place. I thought of the young Francis Bacon emerging from a clump of trees which we passed, and crossing a meadow with our train, rapt from memories of his overnight's deer-stalking at the expense of Sir Thomas Lucy, in a revery of Hamlet, of Romeo, of Othello, of Julius Caesar, of Prince Hal and Falstaff, of Ophelia and Rosalind, of Desdemona and Beatrice, as well as of The Passionate Pilgrim and the Sonnets, and exulting in the notion of tricking future ages in his masquerade of William Shake- speare, the clownish villager of Stratford and dull super- numerary of the Globe Theatre. My Bacon's mind was busy not only with the creatures of his divine imagination, but with the ingenious contrivance of a cryptic acrostic in 275 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES which his name should remain concealed throughout those immortal plays until, ages afterwards, a crazy country- woman of my own should detect in them the same light touch we know in the Essays and the Novum Organum, and her followers should, in a fine frenzy, drag his identity from its hundred hiding-places. I fancied the Sweet Frank holding horses before the theatre in Southwark, or roUicking at the Mermaid Tavern with Ben Jonson, and bantering his fellow-poet to point out a single one of those thousand lines which the magnanimous pedant said the plays would be the better for his blotting. I saw him come joyously masking down the years to the time of Milton, amusing himself by inspiring the patronizing apostrophe to "Sweetest Bacon, Fancy's child, Warbling his native wood-notes wild." Then, later, as I stood beside that world-renowned tablet in the floor of the Stratford church, I thought of the noble amend which the great Puritan poet had made in the lines beginning, "What needs my Bacon for his honored bones?" But this was after I had been some days in Stratford, where I remained through all our diflaculties in housing ourselves, strong in the Bacon religion which necessarily involved the denial of the Shakespeare superstition. II It was our luck always to be coming to places at the height of their seasons unawares, when every hotel was full-up. But in this case we knew beforehand that there was to be a revival of the old English dances in the Bacon 276 A BACONIATSr IN SHAKESPEARE'S TOWN theatre, which would probably crowd Stratford to bursting with strangers, and we secured our lodgings a fortnight in advance. We easily found them, and the smiling maid who met us said, "They were to be in the cottage, weren't they? " in that charming English way which obliges you to fall in with any presumption, and makes you particeps criminis against yourself. The "cottage" stood back of a little court, and the rooms, when seen, proved to be two small coops in the roof adapted to the tastes of poultry that did not care much for fresh air. We said they would not do, and returned to our fly, and went about flinging our- selves on the mercies of a town visitored far beyond its capacity. Our driver remembered at last an ideal place, "More like a villa, sir, than a lodging," but this ideal was shut when we reached it, and we drove down the next street, interrogating the transoms of all the houses with beseeching eyes for the word "Apartments," but in vain, till we saw the word above a door where the maid denied us, as usual, but had still the forbidding on her breath when the mistress came rushing out of the gate after us to say. Yes, there were rooms at No. 8, and we could have our meals at her own table. All New England, though she was really so Old English, looked from her friendly eyes and hospitable face, and in five minutes we were comfortably domiciled. We got a capital table- d'h6te dinner, such as you get almost anywhere in English inns, at the hotel which had just refused us with thanks as lodgers, and next morning we breakfasted at our kind hostess's in the company of other South-Africans and North- Americans; with Australians, we seem the same thing to the English. There was a delicious Spanish melon to make us as much at home as if it were a Rocky Ford cantaloupe; one cut and came again as often as one liked. Life is not always disappointing, but sometimes behaves very handsomely. 27r SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES After breakfast a day of perfect joy began; and though we grieved for a moment to learn that the morris dances, and the jigs and reels which used to be danced when England was merrier, if nakeder and hungrier, than now, were not to be danced on the green outside the Bacon theatre, we learned from every moment's experience to be glad that they took place within on the stage. It was such a time as Bacon himself — or from this out, shall we indulge him in the travesty which he preferred and say Shakespeare? — would have delighted to share with us, and we easily figured him in the audience which crowded the place, where not the least pleasure, but one of the greatest pleasures, of the day was finding ourselves in a group of people such as next to Shakespeare (I will no longer say Bacon) I could most have wished to meet in that place. Ill A distinguished English actor who, in his undistinguished youth, had played the dramatization of a story of the undis- tinguished youth of an American author was brought face to face there by antic chance with the novelist who emerged from his confirmed obscurity to ask the actor's acquaintance; and the actor added over and above his own acquaintance that of all the friends about him — friends who could help the author's ignorance of the things going forward on the stage, and make his joy in them intelligent, though it would have been hard for the most wayfaring of men wholly to err therein. One could not well be mistaken in the pretty little girls and the pretty young girls, and the boys and youths who had come from the farms and shops (and notably from a great blueing factory near by) to take their parts in the com- petitions of song and dance. 278 A. BACONIAN IN SHAKESPEARE'S TOWN All the figures were more or less dramatic, and not pantomimic only, but were sung as well as stepped to the mellow music of small sleigh-bells strapped at knee and ankle, and to the color of flirted handkerchiefs and of ribbons flashing from wrist and elbow. Perhaps the un- learned reader does not know (we did not know till we saw it there) that it is the genius of the morris dance for the dancers to come elastically on for the figure and to drop exhaustedly off at the end in languid procession. Morris On and Morris Off may have been English tradi- tion added to the Moorish dance which some immemorial traveller brought home from Spain; but whatever the origin of the several dramas or of their rendering, their charm was in the bloom and bounding vigor and glad heart of the Merry England which they revived for us. Out of all the sung and acted incidents, I think I should have given the prizes to that one called "Blow away the Morning Dew," and that other one called, "No John, no John." In the one the dancers swayed and swept the shining drops from imaginary meadows; and in the other a Spanish lady denied an EngHsh sailor till her denying "No" unawares turned entreaty against his threat to leave her. I suppose the things were both of the nature of such things as are still played at children's parties, but in the elder youthful rendering they had the poetry which keeps the world young. There was another of these plays prettily called "Blue-eyed Stranger," which, together with "Bunches of Laudanum" (probably not originally lauda- num) and "Cottage Gardens," pleased the fancy almost as much as those supreme two; and there was yet a very English other, "How do you do, Zir," which mixed de- fiance with welcome in the hands shaken across the circle, and was acceptably done by half-grown boys in smock- frocks and sl6uching farm-work hats. Everything went on imder the severe criticism of a com- 279 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES mittee appointed to see that the dances were danced in the letter as well as the spirit. It seemed very English, or at least not American, to have the young gentleman who spoke for the 'committee call his censures across the whole depth of the theatre and tell the boys and girls, great and small, that they had not kept their legs stiff enough in a certain figure where they faced and crossed ankles. "You must keep your legs stiff er," he said, and the dancers took his rebuke with silent submission; but he found it harder to exact obedience from an enthusiastic fiddler who had entered so deeply into the affair that he could not get himself unaided out of it. He was always leading the dancers on to pretty much the same tune, till at last the chairman publicly proclaimed, "Now, Ilming- ton, you have been on half a dozen times" (it might have been a dozen), "and we can't have you any more," and with this at last Ilmington acquiesced and evanesced, not apparently very willingly or promptly, but effectively. IV I am aware of giving, barely enough, the brief outline of a pleasure which richly clothed itself in music, color, and motion for a whole summer's day, and still left us hungering for more of it. Most interesting it was, and the more delightful because it reproduced the gayety of the past without its sad conditions; we saw the bloom and inhaled the perfume without feeling the thorns of the bramble which bore the pretty flowers. What made it the more acceptable was the reflection that the England making merry on the stage was glad at the cost of less suffering to the poor than ever before. Thanks to that greatest living Englishman, who is Welsh, there are now pensions for the old and sick and those without work, 280 A BACONIAN IN SHAKESPEAEE'S TOWN keeping them above want without putting them to shame. Lloyd-George has taken the sting from charity by making it justice, and forcing the rich to pay something more of their due portion of the common cost, as perhaps we Americans shall some day do when we sink our fear of Socialism in our realization of Christianity; so that now an Englishman and his American visitor may hereafter look on the joys of the poor without too sharp a pity. Even that day we could blamelessly feel the appealing quaintness of an old woman from some charitable refuge who had come out of it in her pathetic best bonnet and shawl and gown of the fashions of seventy years ago, and now sang a faded song, as cheap in material and uncouth in make as her dress, but touching because it was so sincerely meant. I am glad to say that no event of the day seemed to please the audience half as much; so near to tears her doleful ditty left us, we could go back to our players and dancers with a good conscience. I do not know how long it all lasted, but say from eleven to four, with an hour out for lunch; at the end, as I have said, it left us loath to go. We had been in Strat- ford before, and we had not the task of seeing the Bacon house and keeping the Shakespeare family out of it; we had even seen the Ann Hathaway cottage, where the young Francis Bacon came wooing her and making her believe by the new inductive method of reasoning that her seven years more than his did not count in love. So now we could give our leisure to wandering about the streets, curiously modern for the most part, but with here and there an effect of age in quaint keeping with such a name as Sheep Street, where we bought a sixteenth-century table and were later subjected to a hundred per cent, duty on it by our customs as if it had been just made in some English Grand Rapids factory. A noted English novelist lives in Stratford, and her 281 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES house-front, garlanded with flowering plants, was the just pride of the driver of our fly. He seemed to care more for it than for the Shakespeare house; and, in fact, there has never been any dispute as to the Baconian authorship of her novels. We visited the so-called Shake- speare house only so far as to pace its garden walk and gather from the brown sand under the parent tree a mulberry perfect yet from the ants, which know a ripe mulberry as soon as they see it on the ground. The taste of it enchanted me three thousand miles and sixty-five years away to a little. Ohio town with the murmur of the Miami soft in my ear; and I could be well content to leave the house, with its chimney-corners and kitchens and gardens and birth-chambers and every manner of typical rather than actual relics, to the crowd avid of documents and evidences, or, failing these, of mere won- ders and associations. The truth, which I reluctantly confide to the reader, is that to the faith of even the firmest, the most violent Baconian there is something very staggering in that wavering and sagging Shakespeare house; and it is much better to keep to the garden walk under the mulberry- tree, which is at least neutral. We of the true faith ought really to build a Bacon house and a Bacon theatre, with a Bacon picture-gallery, in Stratford, if we expect to establish our doctrine in universal acceptance. As for that divinely dear and lovely church where the poet's body lies, it would of course be difiicult to rear such another fane of the fit antiquity; but something might have been done in 1800, when the slab over the bones was renewed, if only anybody had then had the Baconian truth which was not revealed to the liuninous madness of Miss Bacon till fifty years later. As it is, the place is full of Shakespeare to the exclusion of the many other inter- esting monuments and effigies. The famous epitaph 282 A BACONIAN IN SHAKESPEARE'S TOWN still curses or blesses you according to your will, and the face of the bust, scraped clean of the white paint which once coated it to an effect of eighteenth-century good taste, smiles down upon you in the Elizabethan sincerity of red cheeks, hazel eyes, and reddish hair and beard. How still and fine the cool English morning was under the "long-drawn aisle and fretted vault" of the trees through which we 'went and came in revering this hallowed temple! But we had once for all revered it on our first visit to Stratford, and now, on our second, we left it to the devoirs of others. Rather we kept our last afternoon for a row on the Avon, and hired a boatman to do the rowing for us. The Avon, as we knew it that day, was a leaf-fringed, silent slackwater (very unlike the joyous torrent we had known it at Bath), inviting us first down to the dam, which, with the mill beside it, holds the waters in check. I cannot say just why it should have so invited us except to show us on our return a shirt-sleeved, bare- headed youth in a canoe which suddenly and most un- expectedly (to us if not to him) turned turtle and flung him into the stream. It then flew inverted away, and as he struck out after it, blowing the water from him as he swam, he called out to our boatman in gay, trans- atlantic accents, "Is bathing in this river prohibited?" The boatman took him literally and reassured him, while we offered to "cumber him with help." "No, thank you," he said, "unless you can tell me where my coat and cap are." "Probably under the canoe," we suggested, and, "Probably they are," he assented, and he swam to the canoe and righted it and found them. It is not often that one can make a useful suggestion to a countryman 19 283 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES in a strange water, and we rowed away with the satis- faction of a public benefactor, leaving the youth joking and wringing the Avon from his coat on the shore. I suppose there are lovelier rivers in the world than the Avon at Stratford; the Babylonians used to brag of their Abana and Pharpar; and we have our Hudson and Mis- sissippi, which are certainly larger. But the Avon" not only has Stratford on it, with its immortal memories; it wanders through levels of wood and meadow which almost meet over it, or come to drink of it with their grasses; and from time to time it has a dwelling on its shores which tempts you to the nearest "estate agent" with the design of instant purchase, whether the house is for sale or not. The notion of hiring is too pale and poor; what you want is to own the place and live beside those storied waters a whole lifetime of sunny hours such as the English sum- mer knows how to spare the deserving waj'farer amid its more serious business of raining. I suppose it must have rained the next day, or that evening, for I have no recol- lection of the contrary; but we had our afternoon as perfect and sweet and mellow as that mulberry on the walk in Shakespeare's garden. Other delights there had been through hospitalities which I must summon what little good taste I have to keep from betraying. But I will not trj' to ignore, even in the high interest of refined travel (travel striving to be everything that the English passion for privacy could ask of it), the signal pleasure of seeing somewhat afar the mansion of that historian of the American Revolution whose generous sense of our great struggle should make us, if possible, prouder of it than ever. There is no Englishman worthier than Sir George Trevelyan to dwell in that Shakespearian air among those Shakespearian fields and woods which were once Shakespeare's very own. 284 A BACONIAN IN SHAKESPEAEE'S TOWN VI More days than we had might well have been given to the Shakespeare library and gallery (with whatever grief for its mistakenness), more nights than we had to the Shakespeare theatre. We had come to Stratford partly to see that dramatization by an American woman of the Pied Piper of Hamelin legend, which had such fine mo- ments of gentle poetic beauty and pathos; and the night after, we saw in the same place that most ungrateful and reluctant of the Shakespearian — or Baconian — tragedies, Richard II. It is idle for us to pretend that the Amer- ican stage is equal to the English in realizing to the eye the historic circumstance of such a play; we might as well pretend we equal their acting. There was something richly absolute in the presentation of the figures in that scene; nothing was wanting to the splendor of the haughty Bolingbroke and the proud Norfolk making their brags and exchanging their challenges before that sad, silly despot whom their quarrel begins bringing to his prison and murder. I thought Mr. Benson did his Richard wonderfully well, while he let all the others play as ably up to him. I could have fancied that night in Stratford that it would have been a high pleasure to both Bacon and Shakespeare if they could have once sunk the question of its authorship and come to see it together. A PAIR OF PAGEANTS A PAIR OF PAGEANTS Perhaps it is my love of alliteration which tempts me to put together under the same head two events so different in scope and character as the pageant at Chester in 1910 and the pageant at Stroud in 1911. Their equal claim upon me is that they were both pageants, for which I have a passion that does not very willingly distinguish in its objects; to my impartial affection it is enough that a pageant is a pageant. Even when I came to London soon after seeing the magnificent historic show at Ches- ter, and saw a Potted Pageant at the Apollo playhouse under the direction of Mr. Palissier, my pleasure in the kind was not spoiled by a bouffe WiUiam the Conqueror, a burlesque Queen Elizabeth, and a comic Queen Anne taking hands and romping in a ring together with other princes; or by a local mayor who grabbed the whole glory of the affair in an autobiographical opening address: I merely found myself wishing that the potted pageant was as long as the pageant I had just come from. They had been having pageants before that pretty well all over England — at Bath, at Oxford, at Stratford-on- Avon, and I do not remember just where else — and we had bespoken our joy in that at Chester in some fear that 289 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES we might miss the last of its sort. We made sure of it by committing ourselves to the purchase of expensive seats at the spectacle, which were the last left at the agency of the good Thomas Cook & Son. I was dis- mayed to find them, on the plan, next the band, but I was assured that the band would not annoy even so great an enemy of music as I professed myself; in the event we really found it very quiet; there were times when I forgot it was there. Our train from London brought us to Chester at the very moment of lunch, and experience had taught us to take it at the Boland Restaurant in one of those Rows which make two stories of the street; not in a Row of the second story, but of the ground floor. It is at this insti- tution that the royal family, after trying all the other makes in Great Britain, have decided to have its wedding- cakes made (there are terrible effigies of such cakes in the window) ; but even if you are not a member of that family and do not want to be married you can get perhaps the best, or at least the butteriest, tea-cakes in England at Boland's. You can also get a very good lunch, in the company of other lunchers who crowd every table, up- stairs and down. But if you are served by a quiet little Welsh maid, whose native hills robe themselves in the azure which distance lends to the view westward from Chester, do not permit yourself, in your expansion from the good cheer, to express the hope that she has seen the pageant. She may answer, with her professional smile clouded by personal feeling, that they have been so busy at Boland's she has had no time and will not have even this last day. Beware, then, of asking about the dance which you have seen advertised for that evening; if you do you must go further and learn that she could get time for that; then nothing remains for you but to supply the four shillings for the ticket and bring the light 290 A PAIR OF PAGEANTS back to the young face. It is no great sum, to be sure; but I would have you reflect upon the enormity of encour- aging frivolity in the lower classes and raising the vain hope in the hearts of quiet little Welsh maids that every American traveller will be as weak as yourself. Chester was, however, so full of the holiday emotions of the pageant that the pocket opened almost of itself. Their play encountered the eye wherever it turned, in the ancient Britons of both sexes clad in the sheepskins or wolfskins so much worn at one period among them; Roman soldiery of the rank and file, sometimes wearing and sometimes carrying their helmets; early Saxons, secular and clerical; early Normans and early English in their several habits, with tributary Welshmen in theirs; crusaders, prelates, monks and nuns, subjects of Richard II. and James I., and Roundheads and Cavaliers. Besides the historical personages, public or private, there were allegorical figures, old and young, on their way to help in the representation of the City, the River Dee, and the like. If some of these did not actually ride down to the grounds on the same tram-top with us, we passed them on their walk thither in pleasant emulation of the tram's efifort to arrive first with us. When we were on foot within the grounds the allegory and history easily out- walked us. The characters were in a hurry, doubtless, to find their places in the order of the pageant and we could loiter on with no care but to arrive at the vast wooden auditorium and get our seats. The mid-July day was one of the best that any summer could do in England, and it was one of the best that the actual summer could do anywhere, though the season was of great cold and wet. Large spaces in the sky were blue and there were acceptable masses of white clouds in the blue, white clouds with their edges and bulks roughed here and there to a fine rustiness; 291 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES clouds such as Constable liked to paint in his English land- scapes, with trees tossing under them. The air was delicious, growing a little fresher as the afternoon wore away and deciding in the evening to be so cold that in the abiding indoors chill we judged it best to have a fire in the grate at our hotel. II The grounds for the pageant were lent by the Duke of Westminster, who could spare them for the week of the show without greatly missing them from the eight thou- sand acres attached to his seat there. They were gener- ously ample and were perfectly fitted to be the scene of the magnificent spectacle by their shape and their simple and effective features. They spread before the spectator in a rounded square of nearly a mile in length and breadth, and where the green plain sloped gently away on every side beautiful groves rose densely and formed the setting of the incomparable scene. Through those dark arras the actors in the pageant came and went by thousands on foot and horseback, or, emerging, fluttered over the grass as if their wings of gauze and silk helped them in a real flight. We had the company of some fairies of tender and mature years as well as of the scattering allegorical and historical types in our rather long way from where the tram left us to our seats next the unjustly dreaded or- chestra. But then the usual wait ensued before we confronted them in action, and we had time to become aware of that smell of the trodden weed and of the fresh pine planking which is so temperamental of circuses and county fairs, and of those hasty shelters for the purveyance of cold victuals and hot drinks (tea, only, at Chester, and not our more national coffee), but there the parallel ended. 292 A PAIR OF PAGEANTS There is no place in America with memories half or a tenth or a twentieth as long as Chester's. Her record beggars history and must be imagined in its earliest de- tails, for there is nothing really very reliable known of the Druidic civilization. We had to take the Druids and the Druidesses on trust, but we did so gladly; they looked so attractive. The ancient Britons more acceptably vouched for themselves, and when, after an entirely alle- gorical introductory act, with the goddess River Dee and the god Chester City (and persons "presenting walls" and gates and towers) we came to the good Roman general Agricola and the attempt of an indignant Briton, whose wife has been insulted by a centurion, to assassinate the general, we were on the firm ground of imaginable history. In these circumstances it was very satisfactory to have the Briton pardoned and the centurion condemned to death within the hour, though with my weak-hearted reluctance from capital punishment I could not help hoping his sentence would be commuted to banishment from the British Isles; the summer there was then so wet and cold he would not have minded that much. The English like their patriotism good and thick (as I suppose we like ours), and a main business of the pageants, which have covered a large part of their coimtry in these last years, has been to flatter their local and national pride. Of course they have a good deal to be proud of as well as sorry for in their history, and their history has touched significantly almost every place in the country. At Chester, as I need not tell the well-guide-booked American, history has touched significantly very often and even made important pauses. It was to these touches and pauses that the beautiful pageant was now devoted. There was the opening allegory and the assertion of British manhood and the sanctity of the British home in that passage with Agricola at no exact date, and then 293 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES there was King Edgar receiving in 973 the homage of tributary princes, which, as the princes were Welsh and of my own blood, went somewhat against my grain; then in 1093 there was Hugh Lupus (whose lineage still sur- vives at Chester in the reigning nobleman, the Duke of Westminster) helping St. Anselm found the Abbey of St. Warburg; then, a century later, that delightful author, Giraldus Cambrensis, helping Archbishop Baldwin preach the Crusade at Chester; then, another century later, Prince Edward, the first royal earl, visiting the city; in yet another poor Richard XL, brought captive there by proud Bolingbroke; then, after a great jump of three centuries, James I. visiting Chester, and presently his son Charles I. besieged there by Cromwell in 1645 and driven out of the place, which surrendered itself to Parliament. I will not be sure which of the last two events was graced by the morris dancing of the little girls and the young girls, with their mates, or in which the clowns capered about and wrestled and threw somersaults; but we will say the merrymen helped receive James I. (he was something of a buffoon himself), and that it was the prettier revels which the Roundheads broke up when they rushed upon the scene after much musketry in the distance and the flight of Charles I. To end all, there was a r6sum6 of the events in a tableau before the grand-stand. Ill It will have been imagined from the detail of these events what motive there was for gorgeous costuming and brilliant action. The literature of the pageant was neces- sarily an "easy thing to understand," but it was so in no slighting sense, and the art in the color scheme was, if not the last word, at least the next to the last. It had 294 A PAIE OF PAGEANTS strongly the support of nature in that beauty of the English race which I think grows upon the observer. In former visits I had been, in my modest American way, impressed by the handsomeness of the men, and I still think them the handsomest men in Europe, if somewhat unnecessarily long-legged and narrow-shouldered; but at present I am lost in a far readier and more imenvious wonder at the women's and children's loveliness, especially the children's. It does not always follow that a lovely little girl will grow up a lovely young girl; the angelic features sometimes turn out humanly lumpy, butjgenerally they do not; the young girls are mostly more beautiful than the little girls, if not more delicately beautiful, and the women keep their beauty of face and figure longer; there are not so many lean ones, nor so many fat ones among the matrons as with us. In them all — little girls, yoimg girls, and wives and mothers — the beauty is not beauty of coloring alone, but beauty of feature and a imiversal kindness of expression. In England every- body seems kind; and they perhaps must be kind, or, packed so densely together as they are, they would kill one another. Another characteristic of the race which especially lent itself to the effect of such a thing as the Chester pageant is its all but universal single-mindedness. The children not more than the women, the women not more than the men, had given themselves to the work of their play with a seriousness unbroken by the ironical self- consciousness which with us would have forced them to treat it as a huge joke, however well they did it. The Chester pageant, it must be imderstood, was the voluntary dedication of time and person by the performers to the public event. That was no mean sacrifice, for the pageant lasted a whole week, day after day; the rehearsals must have lasted twice as long, and the preparation of the costumes and properties must have taken months. Every- 295 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES thing was done by the actors themselves, though of course under sesthetic direction. Every class and almost every calling was represented among the performers; the Countess of Grosvenor, who marched past the grand- stand, was not more superb or less sincere in her stately beauty than the magnificent girl studying for the stage who represented the River Dee throughout the allegory and the events where a river might fitly intervene. The men and the women took their parts as simple-heartedly as the children, but of course the children were the most charming, whether they were boys or girls. It was a gallant sight when the kingly or princely horsemen broke in a gallop from those distant groves and spread over that mighty meadow with their retinues following on foot; it was fine to see the queens and their gentlewomen in the dress of their different epochs; it was richly satisfjdng to look on James the First and Charles the First and Crom- well in the flesh, with earlier and less familiar sovereigns dating back from Richard the Second; but that nameless multitude of little ones flashing from the woods and flying down the grass was best. It was in these endearing creatures that the color scheme of the pageant had its supreme effect, and if many colds and coughs and count- less aches and pains must ensue from their high joys, the joys were worth it. IV How long the spectacle lasted I would not like to say; only it came to an end too soon for me in that heartbreak which the last act of one's earliest (or latest) circus brings. The pageant was, in fact, very like a circus in the emotions it roused; and at times I was aware of the band going on at my elbow like a circus band, but perhaps sweetlier and never molestively. At times there was singing, very good 296 A PAIE OF PAGEANTS singing, from a choir at my elbow, such as they have in England; and at one high moment there was an inter- mission when everybody broke away and thronged the sheds behind the grand-stand for tea. The crowd out- nimibered the placid maidens pouring the tea perhaps a thousand to one; and the maidens served with fine im- partiality the comeliest of the youths who pressed upon them. When one who was neither a youth nor comely soliloquized his despair of tea from them in the cry, "Well, I give it up," a comely youth had compassion on him in the reply, "Oh, don't lose heart!" and won a general applause, while the object of his pity moved off to another shed where a plain, middle-aged matron sold him a cup of tea instantly. In the delaying perfection of photography, which still halts short of the hues of life in its endeavor for reality, there is no manner of imparting an adequate notion of the beauty and splendor of the Chester pageant. Not having been a contemporary of the different events, I could not be sure whether they were accurately clothed or not, but I imagine all that had been most intelligently looked to. What I was sure of was my pleasure in the ever-streaming, ever-fleeting color. Of course the women were more beautifully clad than the men, though these had occasionally the superior splendor which our sex has now mostly left to peacocks and turkey-gobblers and major-generals; but it was the children, those lovely English children, who supremely took the eye in their silken blues and reds and yellows. They came pouring over the scene literally in thousands; they danced, they seemed to fly; nothing more exquisite, more innocently dear was ever seen. Whatever the historic incident was, they were appropriate to it; they graced, they hallowed it. I dare say they were sometimes naughty in every- day life and had to be cuffed, or at least snubbed, and 297 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES sent prematurely to bed, but there was no hint of this in the pageant, or of the stomach-aches which must follow their prolonged exposure and exertion. After the pageant, when we began to see them straying homeward through the streets, they were still angels — tired angels who were somewhat languidly doing Morris Off when they had been so vigorously doing Morris On. Fragments of the spectacle, dispersed and returning for the time to private life, showed themselves to our well- contented eyes; yoimg fellows in their prehistoric skins and furs, consorting impartially with Druidesses and court ladies, and Puritan maidens coquetting wdth Cavaliers off duty, were to be seen on the way to our hotel and disappearing down the different side-streets where they possibly dwelt. If I had my choice, I think I should prefer to have kept for longest companionship a Roman soldier on a bicycle, with his helmet hanging at his saddle- bow for his greater convenience in smoking a cigarette. But I should like to have kept them all, and my only sorrow is that the Chester pageant should not have lasted till now, that it should so soon have followed the circuses of my boyhood into the irrevocable past. It seemed extremely probable that we should have to walk the whole way back to town, but if you will have patience you can nearly always get some sort of carriage to take you home in England, and there really proved a superfluity of conveyances from the pageant groimds; in the persisting excitement everybody else seemed to prefer going on foot. When we reached our hotel we foimd it as cold as if the day had not been fine, and that question which so often besets you in England, "Shall we have a 298 A PAIR OF PAGEANTS fire, or sha'n't we?" perplexed us till in our desperation we spent the one-and-six which a fire costs and had a fire. We did not regret it; but if I had saved the one- and-six and gone shuddering to sleep the suffering would since have been made up to me by the suffering from the heat which I underwent on my way to the pageant at Stroud last summer. That season will live long in the memories of people who lived through it, for the drought and the heat were imparalleled. To suggest the excess of both one must beg the American reader to draw upon his associations with our torridest Fourths of July, and imagine these terrible anniversaries repeating themselves iminterruptedly for a month. My journey to Stroud was through what are usually the lovehest of the English levels, but now on both sides the burned fields stretched away in a dry brown for which our favorite figure of a door-mat is inexpressive. They were not only dry and brown, they were often dry and gray; ashen deserts which had abandoned any notion of verdure. The dusty hedges ran backward and outward from the train, sere, stiff, Hfeless; the trees which are so plump and full in the English landscape stood lean and listless in circles of their fallen leaves. Stroud is a pretty town, mostly manu- facturing, with tall chimneys "hearsed with pliunes of smoke," but also streets and streets of pleasant small dwellings stretching along the slopes of the Cotswold Hills. As we neared the place and began to mount these slopes the scenery began to cheer up a httle; when we reached Stroud, it was as if the pageant had arranged with the elements and had really provided itself with something like the wonted EngHsh green for its entoiu-age. It had not rained apparently, and the stage, though not com- parable in size with the stage at Chester, could not have been lawn-hosed, yet it was green and it comforted the eyes after that vision of a burned-out world. 20 299 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES The scene of the Stroud pageant, though it was no such vast expanse as the scene of the pageant at Chester, was still ample, and it held the slighter performance in an embrace which was not too strict for it and yet not too lax for its details. Some rows of trees formed the coulisses, and behind them one could see the actors in the events gathering before they came upon the scene. On the turfy slopes to left and right the spectators thronged in the white or the bright dresses that contrasted with the green where they stood or loimged in large or little groups. The English sun, that often seems so fierce, does not mean murder like ours; the heat was strong, but Ho one would suffer exhaustion from it, and those pretty colors did not shriek as they would have shrieked in our thin air. Even at two o'clock a delicate haze veiled the gentle hills form- ing the amphitheatre, and as the afternoon waned they grew dimmer and dimmer under it. VI. The grass of those hills has been immemorially cropped by sheep whose wool has locally been more desired than their mutton, and the thread of industrial interest which ran through the incidents of the pageant was the fibre which successive improvements have refined and woven into richer and softer cloths at Stroud. Another thread, but this of humanitary interest, which helped hold the scenes together, was the notion of advancing civilization which the poet of the play boldly declared in the title of a Mid-Gloucestershire Pageant of Progress. He had meant to "moralize his song" and his diSiculty was to let it not "perhaps turn out a sermon." He had succeeded in this as well as in keeping his text simple and plain with- out allowing it to drop to the level of commonplace. It 300 A PAIE OF PAGEANTS kept the level of the common people, which is not that of commonplace, and it expressed the things that might have been felt and thought about the facts by the actors. For these men, women, and children were work-folk, Stroud factory operatives and Stroud farmers, who had given the leisure won from their work to learning and dressing and staging the poet's intention. Of course there was an artistic scheme for the pageant, as there was a literary scheme, and the work-folk conformed to the one as they conformed to the other. But that they should love both so much as to give their time and their money to both formed the charm of the affair which began drawing me irresistibly to Stroud as soon as I read of the promised pageant. Naturally, perhaps inevitably, the pageant opened with a scene between the Druidic Britons and the humane Roman soldiers who released some captives about to be offered up in worship by the Druids, and erected "an altar to Terminus, the god of roads," to whose cult we doubtless owe at this day oiu- pleasure in travelling about England. A more historical incident followed in the Lady Gytha's forcing Earl Godwin, by refusing to eat any food from the lands he had robbed the Nuns of Berkeley of, to make them due reparation with other lands for their convent. Next the King's commissioners, coming to value the lands for the Domesday Book, liberate a cofl3e of child slaves on their way to be sold in Bristol; next Edward III. teaches the people of the Cotswold Hills to tolerate the Flemish weavers he has brought among them that they may learn how to weave their own wool and not send it away to be woven; next Queen Elizabeth reads them a like toleration of the Huguenot refugees who have come among them and whom the singers and dancers round the maypole have turned from their merrymaking to kick and cuff. Another episode brings Puritans and 301 SEVEN ENGLISH CITIES Cavaliers together in hailing, for peace' sake, the return of King Charles II.; he has not yet had time to show himself the imgrateful profligate he was, and one could forgive the limping logic of his people's reconciliation to him. Mrs. Siddons, in thesucceeding event, instructs the good, kind, dull George III. to think better of the theatre than he has done hitherto, and the King congratulates Robert Raikes on the institution of Sunday-schools. After this there are Com Law Riots in 1846, which are appeased by the news of the repeal of the Corn Laws; and the pageant closes with a vision of Present Day Progress. Fortunately, the great railway strike had just ended, and the incongruities could not make themselves felt so keenly as they might have done ten days earlier. VII. If I have insisted too wholly on the part taken by the work-folk in the pageant, this seems the place to say that some of the gentle as well as the simple shared in it. Lady Gytha was done by the wife of the poet, and Mrs. Siddons by a young lady of a chief local family, who both gave artistic as well as social distinction to the affair, though for me it had its supreme appeal as the affair of the common people. I believe it was the poet's notion that it should be so; and I might easily praise more than I have praised his sympathetic conception of progress as the advance which they had made. They were humor- ously as well as pathetically characterized in his drama, which touched the extinct conditions with the life of passion and prejudice and painted the picture while it told the story of the past. Now and then, as in the portraiture of our own last king, that poor George III., with his "What, what, what?" and his "Eh? Eh?" there was a bit of refreshing comedy. 302 A PAIR OP PAGEANTS The pageant was throughout a series of escapes from the didactic for the poet, but these were so triumphant that I found myself forgetting at times the ethical import of this scene or that in the beauty of it. I feel now as if I had rather rubbed the moral in on my reader; but the trouble is that I could bring the moral away with me and I had to leave the loveliness behind in that cup of the Cotswold Hills; the singing and the dancing, the brave dressing, the good, stout declamation of some, the delicate sense and expression of others. I had to leave even the Boy Scouts, who helped operate the pageant and were evident throughout, as they are so often in England now. They did not, perhaps, operate the pageant so distinctly as their early presence on the scene seemed to promise, but they became remarkably useful'before it ended in bringing round tea. With their bare arms and legs and sandal-shoon, and the staves with which they help their activities in scouting throughout Britain, they were as picturesque as any integral actors in the drama. THE END nil '!Hi iiiiiiiniiiiiiihii M Ulii