ially at Stratford, in the early part of July. In
London an umbrella is as often carried as a cane; in Paris _"un homme
a para-pluie"_ is, or used to be, supposed to carry that useful
article because he does not keep and cannot hire a carriage of some
sort. He may therefore be safely considered a person, and not a
personage.

The soil of England does not seem to be worn out, to judge by the
wonderful verdure and the luxuriance of vegetation. It contains a great
museum of geological specimens, and a series of historical strata which
are among the most instructive of human records. I do not pretend to
much knowledge of geology. The most interesting geological objects in
our New England that I can think of are the great boulders and the
scratched and smoothed surface of the rocks; the fossil footprints in
the valley of the Connecticut; the trilobites found at Quincy. But the
readers of Hugh Miller remember what a variety of fossils he found in
the stratified rocks of his little island, and the museums are full of
just such objects. When it comes to underground historical relics, the
poverty of New England as compared with the wealth of Old England is
very striking. Stratum after stratum carries the explorer through the
relics of successive invaders. After passing through the characteristic
traces of different peoples, he comes upon a Roman pavement, and below
this the weapons and ornaments of a tribe of ancient Britons. One cannot
strike a spade into the earth, in Great Britain, without a fair chance
of some surprise in the form of a Saxon coin, or a Celtic implement, or
a Roman fibula. Nobody expects any such pleasing surprise in a New
England field. One must be content with an Indian arrowhead or two, now
and then a pestle and mortar, or a stone pipe. A top dressing of
antiquity is all he can look for. The soil is not humanized enough to be
interesting; whereas in England so much of it has been trodden by human
feet, built on in the form of human habitations, nay, has been itself a
part of preceding generations of human beings, that it is in a kind of
dumb sympathy with those who tread its turf. Perhaps it is not literally
true that

One half her soil has walked the rest
In poets, heroes, martyrs, sages;

but so many of all these lie within it that the whole mother island is a
_campo santo_ to all who can claim the same blood as that which
runs in the veins of her unweaned children.

The flora and fauna of a cou