ings that are hackneyed are
right), for then you see first the full, soft gardens of Kent, which
are, perhaps, an exaggeration, but still a typical exaggeration, of the
rich rusticity of England. As it happened, also, a fellow-traveller with
whom I had fallen into conversation felt the same freshness, though for
another cause. She was an American lady who had seen Europe, and had
never yet seen England, and she expressed her enthusiasm in that
simple and splendid way which is natural to Americans, who are the most
idealistic people in the whole world. Their only danger is that the
idealist can easily become the idolator. And the American has become
so idealistic that he even idealises money. But (to quote a very able
writer of American short stories) that is another story.

"I have never been in England before," said the American lady, "yet
it is so pretty that I feel as if I have been away from it for a long
time."

"So you have," I said; "you have been away for three hundred years."

"What a lot of ivy you have," she said. "It covers the churches and
it buries the houses. We have ivy; but I have never seen it grow like
that."

"I am interested to hear it," I replied, "for I am making a little list
of all the things that are really better in England. Even a month on
the Continent, combined with intelligence, will teach you that there are
many things that are better abroad. All the things that the DAILY MAIL
calls English are better abroad. But there are things entirely English
and entirely good. Kippers, for instance, and Free Trade, and front
gardens, and individual liberty, and the Elizabethan drama, and hansom
cabs, and cricket, and Mr. Will Crooks. Above all, there is the happy
and holy custom of eating a heavy breakfast. I cannot imagine that
Shakespeare began the day with rolls and coffee, like a Frenchman or a
German. Surely he began with bacon or bloaters. In fact, a light bursts
upon me; for the first time I see the real meaning of Mrs. Gallup and
the Great Cipher. It is merely a mistake in the matter of a capital
letter. I withdraw my objections; I accept everything; bacon did write
Shakespeare."

"I cannot look at anything but the ivy," she said, "it looks so
comfortable."

While she looked at the ivy I opened for the first time for many weeks
an English newspaper, and I read a speech of Mr. Balfour in which
he said that the House of Lords ought to be preserved because it
represented something in the