e enthusiasm of the children. The Waterloo Hotel, to which, by
advice of friends, we were driven, seemed by its very name to carry out
the idea of saturation, which the activities of nature so insistently
conveyed. It was intensely discomfortable, and though the inside of the
hotel was well supplied with gloomy English comforts, and the solemn
meals were administered with a ceremonious gravity that suggested their
being preliminaries to funerals, yet it was hard to be light-hearted.
The open-grate coal fires were the most welcome feature of this summer
season, and no doubt the wine list offered the best available substitute
for sunlight; but we had not been trained to avail ourselves of it.
We drank water, which certainly appeared an idle proceeding in such a
climate. In Liverpool, however, or in its suburbs, we were to live for
the better part of four years, and we must make the best of it. And
there is in English people, when rightly approached, a steady and
systematic geniality that not only makes handsome amends for their
weather, but also accounts for the otherwise singular fact that the
country is inhabited at all. A people with a smaller fund of interior
warmth could not have endured it. The French talk about conquering
England, but they could not hold it if they did, and it is one of the
standing puzzles of history how the Romans, an Italian race, were able
to maintain themselves under these skies during four centuries. It may
be objected that the present English population is not indigenous to the
island; but they are the survival of the fittest and toughest selected
from many aspirants. Nor can it be doubted that the British hunger for
empire in all parts of the world is due to nothing so much as to their
anxiety to have a plausible pretext for living elsewhere than at home.

My father took the rain, as he took everything that could not be helped,
philosophically, and it seemed to do him no harm; indeed, his health
was uniformly good all through his English residence. It did not suit so
well my mother, who was constitutionally delicate in the lungs; she was
soon obliged to adopt the English respirator, and finally was driven
to take refuge for the greater part of a year in Lisbon and Madeira,
returning only a little before the departure of the family for Italy in
1858. But there must have been in him an ancestral power of resistance
still effective after more than two centuries of transplantation; he
grew ruddy