We had long been
dwelling in tents, as it were, and morally shivering by hearths which,
heap the bituminous coal upon them as we might, no blaze could render
cheerful. I remember, to this day, the dreary feeling with which I sat
by our first English fireside, and watched the chill and rainy twilight
of an autumn day darkening down upon the garden; while the portrait
of the preceding occupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable
personage in his lifetime) scowled inhospitably from above the
mantel-piece, as if indignant that an American should try to make
himself at home there. Possibly it may appease his sulky shade to know
that I quitted his abode as much a stranger as I entered it. But now, at
last, we were in a genuine British home, where refined and warm-hearted
people had just been living their daily life, and had left us a
summer's inheritance of slowly ripened days, such as a stranger's hasty
opportunities so seldom permit him to enjoy.
Within so trifling a distance of the central spot of all the world,
(which, as Americans have at present no centre of their own, we may
allow to be somewhere in the vicinity, we will say, of St. Paul's
Cathedral,) it might have seemed natural that I should be tossed about
by the turbulence of the vast London-whirlpool. But I had drifted into a
still eddy, where conflicting movements made a repose, and, wearied with
a good deal of uncongenial activity, I found the quiet of my temporary
haven more attractive than anything that the great town could offer.
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