as for us, we didn't leave
England until 1620, when Shakespeare had been perfectly dead four years.
We took very good care not to come away too soon. Chaucer and Spenser
were dead too, and we had nothing to stay for!'"

I was obliged to relax here and give vent to a burst of merriment at
Francesca's absurdities.

"I could see that he had never regarded the matter in that light
before," she went on gaily, encouraged by my laughter, "but he braced
himself for the conflict, and said 'I wonder that you didn't stay a
little longer while you were about it. Milton and Ben Jonson were still
alive; Bacon's Novum Organum was just coming out; and in thirty or forty
years you could have had L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Paradise Lost;
Newton's Principia, too, in 1687. Perhaps these were all too serious and
heavy for your national taste; still one sometimes likes to claim things
one cannot fully appreciate. And then, too, if you had once begun to
stay, waiting for the great things to happen and the great books to
be written, you would never have gone, for there would still have been
Browning, Tennyson, and Swinburne to delay you.'

"'If we couldn't stay to see out your great bards, we certainly couldn't
afford to remain and welcome your minor ones,' I answered frigidly; 'but
we wanted to be well out of the way before England united with Scotland,
knowing that if we were uncomfortable as things were, it would be a good
deal worse after the Union; and we had to come home anyway, and start
our own poets. Emerson, Whittier, Longfellow, Holmes, and Lowell had to
be born.'

"'I suppose they had to be if you had set your mind on it,' he said,
'though personally I could have spared one or two on that roll of
honour.'

"'Very probably,' I remarked, as thoroughly angry now as he intended I
should be. 'We cannot expect you to appreciate all the American poets;
indeed, you cannot appreciate all of your own, for the same nation
doesn't always furnish the writers and the readers. Take your precious
Browning, for example! There are hundreds of Browning Clubs in America,
and I never heard of a single one in Scotland.'

"'No,' he retorted, 'I dare say; but there is a good deal in belonging
to a people who can understand him without clubs!'"

"O Francesca!" I exclaimed, sitting bolt upright among my pillows. "How
could you give him that chance! How COULD you! What did you say?"

"I said nothing," she replied mysteriously. "I did something muc