so much as being in London
again could make me realize that my home now is New York, and how long
and how instinctively, without knowing it, I have been an American. It
is not indeed that I love New York and America more than I love London
and England. In fact, London has never seemed so wonderful to me in the
past as she has seemed during these days of my wistful momentary return
to her strange great heart. But this very freshness of her marvel to one
who once deemed that he knew her so well proves but the completeness of
my spiritual acclimatization into another land. I seem to be seeing her
face, hearing her voice, for the first time; while, all the while, my
heart is full with unforgotten memories, and my eyes have scarce the
hardihood to gaze with the decorum befitting the public streets on many
a landmark of vanished hours. To find London almost as new and strange
to me as New York once seemed when I first sighted her soaring morning
towers, and yet to know her for an enchanted Ghost-Land; to be able to
find my way through her streets--in spite of the new Kingsway and
Aldwych!--with closed eyes, and yet to see her, it almost seems, for the
first time: surely it is a curious, almost uncanny, experience.

Do I find London changed?--I am asked. I have been so busy in
rediscovering what I had half-forgotten, in finding engaging novelties
in things anciently familiar, that the question is one which I feel
hardly competent to answer. For instance, I had all but forgotten that
there was so noble a thing in the world as an old-fashioned English
pork-pie. Yesterday I saw one in a window, with a thrill of recognition,
that made a friend with whom I was walking think for a moment that I
had seen a ghost. He knows nothing of the human heart who cannot realize
how tremulous with ancient heart-break may seem an old-fashioned English
pork-pie--after ten years in America.

And, again, how curiously novel and charming seemed the soft and
courteous English voices--with or without aitches--all about one in
the streets and in the shops--I had almost said the "stores." I am
enamoured of the American accent, these many years, and--the calumny of
superficial observation to the contrary--I will maintain, so far as my
own experience goes, that there is as much courtesy broadcast in America
as in any land; more, I am inclined to think than in France. Yet, for
all that, that something or other in the English voice which I had heard
long s