circumstance next day
to ----, he said that the Londoners pretend to recognize a rustic air in
a countess, if she has been six months from town. Rusticity in such
cases, however, must merely mean a little behind the fashions.

I had suffered curiosity to draw me two miles from my dinner, and was as
glad to get back as just before I had been to run away from it. Still
the past, with the recollections which crowded on the mind, bringing
with them a flood of all sorts of associations, prevented me from
getting into a coach, which would, in a measure, have excluded objects
from my sight. I went to bed that night with the strange sensation of
being again in London, after an interval of twenty years.

The next day I set about the business which had brought me to the
English capital. Most of our passengers were in town, and we met, as a
matter of course. I had calls from three or four Americans established
here, some in one capacity, and some in others; for our country has long
been giving back its increase to England, in the shape of admirals,
generals, judges, artists, writers and _notion-mongers_. But what is all
this compared to the constant accessions of Europeans among ourselves?
Eight years later, on returning home, I found New York, in feeling,
opinions, desires, (apart from profit,) and I might almost say, in
population, a foreign rather than American town.

I had passed months in London when a boy, and yet had no knowledge of
Westminster Abbey! I cannot account for this oversight, for I was a great
devotee of Gothic architecture, of which, by the way, I knew nothing,
except through the prints; and I could not reproach myself with a want of
proper curiosity on such subjects, for I had devoted as much time to their
examination as my duty to the ship would at all allow. Still, all I could
recall of the abbey was an indistinct image of two towers, with a glimpse
in at a great door. Now that I was master of my own movements, one of my
first acts was to hurry to the venerable church.

Westminster Abbey is built in the form of a cross, as is, I believe,
invariably the case with every Catholic church of any pretension. At its
northern end are two towers, and at its southern is the celebrated chapel
of Henry VII. This chapel is an addition, which, allowing for a vast
difference in the scale, resembles, in its general appearance, a school,
or vestry-room, attached to the end of one of our own churches. A Gothic
church is, i