their dreams, with the prospect of comparative affluence
added. They had nearly twelve years of earthly sojourn together before
them, the afternoon sunshine to be clouded a little near the close by
the husband's failing health, but glorified more and more by mutual
love, and enriched with memories of all that had before been unfulfilled
imaginings. This voyage eastward was the space of contemplation between
the two periods, and the balm of its tranquillity well symbolized the
peace of soul and mind with which they awaited what the horizons were to
disclose.

The right way to approach England for the first time is not by the
west coast, but by the south, as Julius Caesar did, beckoned on by the
ghostly, pallid cliffs that seem to lift themselves like battlements
against the invader. It is historically open to question whether there
would have been any Roman occupation, or any Saxon or Norman one
either, for that matter, but for the coquetry of those chalk cliffs.
An adventurer, sighting the low and marshy shores of Lancashire, and
muddying his prows in the yellow waters of the Mersey, would be apt
to think that such a land were a good place to avoid. But the race of
adventurers has long since died out, and their place is occupied by the
wide-flying cormorants of commerce, to whom mud flats and rock deserts
present elysian beauties, provided only there be profit in them.
One kind of imagination has been superseded by another, and both are
necessary to the full exploitation of this remarkable globe that we
inhabit.

But even the level capes of Lancashire were alluring to eyes that saw
England, our venerable mother, loom behind them, with her thousand
years' pageantry of warfare and civilization. The egregious little
island is a thirsty place; the land drinks rain as assiduously as do its
inhabitants beer and other liquors. Heavy mists and clouds enveloped it
as we drew near, and ushered us up the Mersey into a brown omnipresence
of rain. The broad, clear sunshine of the Atlantic was left behind, and
we stood on wet decks and were transported to sloppy wharfs by means
of a rain-sodden and abominably smoking little tug-boat--as the way
was fifty years ago. Liverpool was a gray-stone labyrinth open to the
deluge, and its inhabitants went to and fro with umbrellas over their
heads and black respirators over their mouths, looking as if such were
their normal plight--as, indeed, it was. Much of this was not needed to
quench th