ll, and to remind you that for your ten lines of
writing I have sent you back a hundred. Give my best compliments to
all whom I know, personally or otherwise. God be with you!

"Yours, very sincerely,

"B.W. PROCTER."

Procter always seemed to be astounded at the travelling spirit of
Americans, and in his letters he makes frequent reference to our
"national propensity," as he calls it.

"Half an hour ago," he writes in. July, 1853, "we had three of your
countrymen here to lunch,--countrymen I mean, Hibernically, for two
of them wore petticoats. They are all going to Switzerland, France,
Italy, Egypt, and Syria. What an adventurous race you are, you
Americans! Here the women go merely 'from the blue bed to the
brown,' and think that they have travelled and seen the world. I
myself should not care much to be confined to a circle reaching six
or seven miles round London. There are the fresh winds and wild
thyme on Hampstead Heath, and from Richmond you may survey the
Naiades. Highgate, where Coleridge lived, Enfield, where Charles
Lamb dwelt, are not far off. Turning eastward, there is the river
Lea, in which Izaak Walton fished; and farther on--ha! what do I
see? What are those little fish frisking in the batter (the great
Naval Hospital close by), which fixed the affections of the enamored
American while he resided in London, and have been floating in his
dreams ever since? They are said by the naturalists to be of the
species _Blandamentum album_, and are by vulgar aldermen spoken
carelessly of as _white-bait_.

"London is full of carriages, full of strangers, full of parties
feasting on strawberries and ices and other things intended to allay
the heat of summer; but the Summer herself (fickle virgin) keeps
back, or has been stopped somewhere or other,--perhaps at the
Liverpool custom-house, where the very brains of men (their books)
are held in durance, as I know to my cost.

"Thackeray is about to publish a new work in numbers,--a serial, as
the newspapers call it. Thomas Carlyle is publishing (a sixpenny
matter) in favor of the slave-trade. Novelists of all shades are
plying their trades. Husbands are killing their wives in every day's
newspaper. Burglars are peaching against each other; there is no
longer honor among thieves. I am starting for Leicester on a week's
expedi