ston, bound for Kittery Point
--with nothing to speak of!" Oh, what an eloquent word that "only,"
to express the depths of his humbleness! That is just my case.
During just one hour in the twenty-four--not more--I pause and
reflect in the stillness of the night with the echoes of your
English welcome still lingering in my ears, and then I am humble.
Then I am properly meek, and for that little while I am only the
Mary Ann, fourteen hours out, cargoed with vegetables and tinware;
but during all the other twenty-three hours my vain self-complacency
rides high on the white crests of your approval, and then I am a
stately Indiaman, plowing the great seas under a cloud of canvas and
laden with the kindest words that have ever been vouchsafed to any
wandering alien in this world, I think; then my twenty-six fortunate
days on this old mother soil seem to be multiplied by six, and I am
the Begum, of Bengal, 142 days out from Canton--homeward bound!

He returned to London, and with one of his young acquaintances,
an American--he called her Francesca--paid many calls. It took the
dreariness out of that social function to perform it in that way. With a
list of the calls they were to make they drove forth each day to cancel
the social debt. They paid calls in every walk of life. His young
companion was privileged to see the inside of London homes of almost
every class, for he showed no partiality; he went to the homes of
the poor and the rich alike. One day they visited the home of an
old bookkeeper whom he had known in 1872 as a clerk in a large
establishment, earning a salary of perhaps a pound a week, who now had
risen mightily, for he had become head bookkeeper in that establishment
on a salary of six pounds a week, and thought it great prosperity and
fortune for his old age.

He sailed on July 13th for home, besought to the last moment by a crowd
of autograph-seekers and reporters and photographers, and a multitude
who only wished to see him and to shout and wave good-by. He was sailing
away from them for the last time. They hoped he would make a speech, but
that would not have been possible. To the reporters he gave a farewell
message: "It has been the most enjoyable holiday I have ever had, and I
am sorry the end of it has come. I have met a hundred, old friends, and
I have made a hundred new ones. It is a good kind of riches to have;
there is none better, I think." An