l be pardoned, I
feel sure, by those who know how great and bewildering is the pressure
of social life in London.

I was, no doubt, often more or less confused, in my perceptions, by the
large number of persons whom I met in society. I found the
dinner-parties, as Mr. Lowell told me I should, very much like the same
entertainments among my home acquaintances. I have not the gift of
silence, and I am not a bad listener, yet I brought away next to nothing
from dinner-parties where I had said and heard enough to fill out a
magazine article. After I was introduced to a lady, the conversation
frequently began somewhat in this way:--

"It is a long time since you have been in this country, I believe?"

"It is a _very_ long time: fifty years and more."

"You find great changes in London, of course, I suppose?"

"Not so great as you might think. The Tower is where I left it. The
Abbey is much as I remember it. Northumberland House with its lion is
gone, but Charing Cross is in the same old place. My attention is drawn
especially to the things which have not changed,--those which I
remember."

That stream was quickly dried up. Conversation soon found other springs.
I never knew the talk to get heated or noisy. Religion and politics
rarely came up, and never in any controversial way. The bitterest
politician I met at table was a quadruped,--a lady's dog,--who refused a
desirable morsel offered him in the name of Mr. Gladstone, but snapped
up another instantly on being told that it came from Queen Victoria. I
recall many pleasant and some delightful talks at the dinner-table; one
in particular, with the most charming woman in England. I wonder if she
remembers how very lovely and agreeable she was? Possibly she may be
able to identify herself.

People--the right kind of people--meet at a dinner-party as two ships
meet and pass each other at sea. They exchange a few signals; ask each
other's reckoning, where from, where bound; perhaps one supplies the
other with a little food or a few dainties; then they part, to see each
other no more. But one or both may remember the hour passed together all
their days, just as I recollect our brief parley with the brig
Economist, of Leith, from Sierra Leone, in mid ocean, in the spring of
1833.

I am very far from despising the science of gastronomy, but if I wished
to institute a comparison between the tables of England and America, I
could not do it without eating my way through the