indeed, where will be our old cathedrals, our Warwick Castles, to touch up? We can never have the green turf or the lovely flowers; our torrid summers and frigid winters forbid it. We are a vast country with few people; they are a small country with many people. They can afford to have their railway embankments sodded, their little stations each a flower garden. With us those enormous public works must remain forever rough, great scars on the face of nature. We must get our beauty in other things, and leave to England her peerless enamel of green grass, brilliant flowers, her gray ruins, and graceful ivy.
I was amused, sometimes a little offended, to find how little English people knew of the United States. It seemed impossible to believe that two steamers a week ran between Liverpool and New York,[1] each freighted to the water's edge; and yet the English ladies would ask me if we "ever had ice-cream in New York," if we "had frequent fires because it was built of wood," etc.; and they would smile incredulously when I said it had been against the law for forty years to build a wooden house in New York. And the worst of it is, they do not care to know much in the social way about the United States. The stream of thought flows steadily from England here, not from here there. They are very kind, very friendly, interested in a general way, and consider us a great, wonderful, unknown sort of Australia, and that is all.
One thing they do respect and admire in us — the way we are paying our national debt; but they cannot understand (and who could explain to them?) the curious combinations brought about by our system of poli-
- ↑ This was in 1869.
