and ennobling deeds by which we stand
enriched forevermore,--there broods the shadow of one irreparable
loss,--the loss of England. Success or failure can make no difference
there. English gold, English steel, English pluck, stand today as
always; but English integrity, English staunchness, English love, where
are they? Just where Prescott is, now that we have come to it; for the
substantial stone city a mile and a half away turns out to be a
miserable little dirty, butty, smutty, stagnant owl-cote when you get
into it. What we took for stone is stolidity. It is old, but its age
is squalid, not picturesque. We stumble through the alleys that answer
for streets, and come to the "Dog and Duck," a dark, dingy ale-room,
famous for its fine ale, we are told, or perhaps it was beer: I don't
remember. It is not in male nature to go by on the other side of such a
thing, and we enter,--they to test the beverage, Grande and I to make
observation of the surroundings. We take position in the passage
between the bar-room and parlor. A yellow-haired Saxon child, with
bare legs and fair face, crawls out from some inner hollow to the door,
and impends dangerous on the sill, throwing numerous scared backward
glances over his shoulder. The parlor is taken bodily out of old
English novels, a direct descendant, slightly furbished up and
modernized, of the Village inn parlor of Goldsmith,--homely, clean, and
comfortless. A cotton tidy over the rocking-chair bewrays, wrought
into its crocheted gorgeousness, the name of Uncle Tom. This I cannot
stand. Time may bring healing, but now the wound is still fresh. "O,
you did Uncle-Tom it famously," I hurl out, doubling my fist at the
British lion which glares at me from that cotton tidy. "I remember
those days. O yes! you were rampant on Uncle Tom. You are a famous
friend of Uncle Tom, with your Exeter Halls, and your Lord
Shaftesburys, and your Duchess of Sutherlands! Cry your pretty eyes out
over Uncle Tom, dear, tender-hearted British women. Write appealing
letters to your sisters over the waters, affectionate, conscientious
kindred; canonize your saint, our sin, in tidies, and chair-covers, and
Christmas slippers,--we know how to take you now; we have found out
what all that is worth we can appraise your tears by the bottle--in
pounds, shillings, and pence." But the beer-men curtail my harangue,
so I shake my departing fist at the cowering lion, and, leaving this
British institut