Page:Three Years in Europe.djvu/133

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ENGLAND.
101

board bounded at the sight of their country after their long absence in India or in Burma. There were a District officer and a planter from Assam,—there were a clergyman and his wife and a young lady from Burma, there were another clergyman and wife and three children hailing from Travancore, and there were a telegraph superintendent and his wife and infant son from Northern India. These and all the other passengers had formed a very pleasant party on board, and we all had a very pleasant time of it during the voyage.

We left Plymouth on the morning of the 25th May, and on the evening of the 26th, I saw the lighted shops and the busy streets and the well known houses and squares of old London again!

For days together after my arrival in London I felt as one feels on revisiting an old friend. Every familiar place that I visited, the very streets and squares in which I walked, London University College.brought back vividly to my mind the days of my first sojourn in London, eighteen years ago! Old associations and memories came to me, and I felt at times as if I was the careless youngster again,—as if a wide gulf of eighteen years with their weary weight of work and cares and responsibilities had not severed me from the days of my early youth! I walked by the well known streets and squares and circuses and crescents of London, and scarcely believed that I did not revisit them in a dream! I went to a house near Russell Square where I had lived for a year. The good old lady of the boarding house whom I had known so well was dead,