d his eyes the clearness of
a young man's. I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking
about his years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescent
Englishmen, he could not feel himself old. At any rate he did not once
speak of age, as he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then half
through my forties, was still "You young dog" to him. It was a bright
and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between us, on which indeed
there had never been a shadow, except such as distance throws. He wished
apparently to do everything he could to assure us of his personal
interest; and we were amused to find him nervously apprehensive of any
purpose, such as was far from us, to profit by him officially. He
betrayed a distinct relief when he found we were not going to come upon
him even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which we were to see
by means of an English acquaintance. He had not perhaps found some other
fellow-citizens so considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place,
like presentations to the queen, and complained of the cheap ambitions he
had to gratify in that way.

He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fond
of the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded my
quoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to print
in a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mounting
satisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight
terminate in Lord Percy's coming

"To hammer stone for life in Concord jail."

It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have this
patriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourth
of July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwards
quite for literary reasons. He said, No, let it stand, and let them make
the worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people who
are not gingerly with other people's sensibilities came from the
frankness with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose. He
said he always told them, when there was question of such things, that
the best society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He
contended that the best English was spoken there; and so it was, when he
spoke it.

We were in London out of the season, and he was sorry that he could not
have me meet some titles who he declared had found pleasure in my books;
when we returned from I