y hymns to the
same public up and down the benevolent streets. It was naturally London
that filled his view; his business was in London and his time was short;
the country he saw from the train, whence it made a low cloudy frame for
London, with decorations of hedges and sheep. How he saw London, how he
carried away all he did in the time and under the circumstances, may
be thought a mystery; there are doubtless people who would consider his
opportunities too limited to gather anything essential. Cruickshank was
the only one of the deputation who had been "over" before; and they all
followed him unquestioningly to the temperance hotel of his preference
in Bloomsbury, where bedrooms were three and six and tea was understood
as a solid meal and the last in the day. Bates would have voted for the
Metropole, and McGill had been advised that you saw a good deal of life
at the Cecil, but they bowed to Cruickshank's experience. None of them
were total abstainers, but neither had any of them the wine habit; they
were not inconvenienced, therefore, in taking advantage of the cheapness
with which total abstinence made itself attractive, and they took it,
though they were substantial men. As one of them put it, they weren't
over there to make a splash, a thing that was pretty hard to do in
London, anyhow; and home comforts came before anything. The conviction
about the splash was perhaps a little the teaching of circumstances.
They were influential fellows at home, who had lived for years in the
atmosphere of appreciation that surrounds success; their movements were
observed in the newspapers; their names stood for wide interests, big
concerns. They had known the satisfaction of a positive importance,
not only in their community but in their country; and they had come to
England invested as well with the weight that is attached to a public
mission. It may very well be that they looked for some echo of what they
were accustomed to, and were a little dashed not to find it--to find the
merest published announcement of their arrival, and their introduction
by Lord Selkirk to the Colonial Secretary; and no heads turned in the
temperance hotel when they came into the dining-room. It may very well
be. It is even more certain, however that they took the lesson as they
found it, with the quick eye for things as they are which seems to
come of looking at things as they will be, and with just that humorous
comment about the splash. It would be