hundred and twenty years had passed since our
first ancestor had sought freedom on those disappearing shores, and our
father was the first of his descendants to visit the Old Home whence he
came. What was to be the outcome? But the children only felt that the
ocean was pleasant and strange, and they longed to explore it. The
future and the past did not concern them.

V

A paddle-wheel ocean-liner--The hens, the cow, and the
carpenter--W. D. Ticknor--Our first Englishman--An
aristocratic acrobat--Speech that beggars eulogy--The boots
of great travellers--Complimentary cannon--The last
infirmity of noble republican minds--The golden promise: the
spiritual fulfilment--Fatuous serenity--Past and future--The
coquetry of chalk cliffs--Two kinds of imagination--The
thirsty island--Gloomy English comforts--Systematic
geniality--A standing puzzle--The respirator--Scamps, fools,
mendicants, and desperadoes--The wrongs of sailor-men--"Is
this myself?"--"Profoundly akin"--Henry Bright--Charm of
insular prejudice--No stooping to compromise--The battle
against dinner--"I'm glad you liked it!"--An English-,
Irish-, and Scotchman--An Englishman owns his country--A
contradiction in Englishmen--A hospitable gateway--Years of
memorable trifles.

The steamship Niagara was, in 1853, a favorable specimen of nautical
architecture; the Cunard Company had then been in existence rather less
than a score of years, and had already established its reputation for
safety and convenience. But, with the exception of the red smoke-stack
with the black ring round the top, there was little similarity between
the boat that took us to England and the mammoths that do that service
for travellers now adays. The Niagara was about two hundred and fifty
feet long, and was propelled by paddle-wheels, upon the summits of
whose curving altitudes we were permitted to climb in calm weather.
The interior decorations were neat and pretty, but had nothing of the
palatial and aesthetic gorgeousness which educates us in these later
ages. The company of passengers was so small that a single cow, housed
in a pen on deck, sufficed for their needs in the way of milk, and there
were still left alive and pecking contentedly about their coop a number
of fowls, after we had eaten all we could of their brethren at the ten
dinners that were served during the voyage. The crew, from the capta