ours lasted three months at
least, seven months at most. After a rough calculation, I find that I
have spent not quite five years of my life in America. Five out of sixty
is not a large proportion, yet I often feel that I am half American.
This says a good deal for the hospitality of a people who can make a
stranger feel so completely at home in their midst. Perhaps it also says
something for my adaptableness!

"When we do not speak of things with a partiality full of love, what we
say is not worth being repeated." That was the answer of a courteous
Frenchman who was asked for his impressions of a country. In any case it
is imprudent to give one's impressions of America. The country is so
vast and complex that even those who have amassed mountains of
impressions soon find that there still are mountains more! I have lived
in New York, Boston and Chicago for a month at a time, and have felt
that to know any of these great cities even superficially would take a
year. I have become acquainted with this and that class of American, but
I realize that there are thousands of other classes that remain unknown
to me.

I set out in 1882 from Liverpool on board the _Britannic_ with the fixed
conviction that I should never, never return. For six weeks before we
started, the word America had only to be breathed to me, and I burst
into floods of tears! I was leaving my children, my bullfinch, my
parrot, my "aunt" Boo, whom I never expected to see alive again, just
because she said I never would; and I was going to face the unknown
dangers of the Atlantic and of a strange, barbarous land. Our farewell
performances in London had cheered me up a little--though I wept
copiously at every one--by showing us that we should be missed. Henry
Irving's position seemed to be confirmed and ratified by all that took
place before his departure. The dinners he had to eat, the speeches that
he had to make and to listen to, were really terrific!

One speech at the Rabelais Club had, it was said, the longest peroration
on record. It was this kind of thing: Where is our friend Irving going?
He is not going like Nares to face the perils of the far North. He is
not going like A---- to face something else. He is not going to China,
etc.,--and so on. After about the hundredth "he is not going," Lord
Houghton, who was one of the guests, grew very impatient and
interrupted the orator with: "Of course he isn't! He's going to New York
by the Cunard Line. It'l