o brother Ned to land a fat fish, that's all!"

She had a fear that his operations might at length become offensive to
her taste, might stray from the line of her own ambitions; but she saw
good reason to await developments in silence; and to postpone
deviating from Ned's wishes, until they should cease to forward hers.

Upon her landing at Bristol, and looking around with interest at the
shipping which reminded her of New York but to emphasise her feeling
of exile therefrom, her thrilling sense of being at last in the Old
World, abated her heaviness at leaving the ship which seemed the one
remaining tie with her former life. If ever a woman felt herself to be
entering upon life anew, and realised a necessity of blotting the past
from memory, it was she; and well it was that the novelty of her
surroundings, the sense of treading the soil whereon she had so long
pined to set foot, aided her resolution to banish from her mind all
that lay behind her.

The time-worn, weather-beaten aspect of the town, its old streets
thronged with people of whom she was not known to a soul, would have
made her disconsolate, had she not forced herself to contemplate with
interest the omnipresent antiquity, to her American eyes so new. And
so, as she had heroically endured seasickness, she now fought bravely
against homesickness; and, in the end, as nearly conquered it as one
ever does.

'Twas a cold ride by stage-coach to London, at that season; there were
few travellers in the coach, and those few were ill-natured with
discomfort, staring fiercely at the two strangers--whose strangeness
they instantly detected by some unconscious process--as if the pair
were responsible for the severe February weather, or guilty of some
unknown crime. At the inns where they stopped, for meals and
overnight, they were subjected to a protracted gazing on the part of
all who saw them--an inspection seemingly resentful or disapproving,
but indeed only curious. It irritated Madge, who asked Ned what the
cause might be.

"Tut! Don't mind it," said he. "'Tis the way of the English,
everywhere but in London. They stare at strangers as if they was in
danger of being insulted by 'em, or having their pockets picked by
'em, or at best as if they was looking at some remarkable animal; but
they mean no harm by it."

"How can they see we are strangers?" she queried. "We're dressed like
them."

"God knows! Perhaps because we look more cheerful than they do, and