inion regarding those unhappily not included in the magic
circle to which he belongs, and I felt that, if ever I visited my young
American cousins, it would be to give them the benefit of my superior
old-world experience.

I may say at once that I had not been in the country long, before I
found it desirable to climb down, discovering that it was quite as much
as I could do to keep my footing at all on one or the other of the
scaling ladders I had tried to ascend. But for all my ups and downs, one
thing is certain: it was a happy thought that led me to take my passage
to New York, and a specially happy one to cross with Irving and Ellen
Terry.

"I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends."

--_Richard II._

So wrote Irving in my album, dating the lines from the "Atlantic Ocean,
20th October 1883."

It was indeed a time of good and friendly relations we had on that
Atlantic, meeting at a sort of poet's corner of the captain's table at
dinner-time, and later again, when we could discuss the merits of the
nocturnal Welsh rarebit, or of the comforting nightcap. Those expressive
legs of his, with which we are all so familiar, were a constant source
of delight to me. In the smoking saloon he would know how to stretch
them till they gave you a sense of absolute rest; and when he got up,
you felt they must originally have been designed for sea-legs. When
sometimes I paced the deck by their side, I felt I could now really
boast of being in the same boat with my illustrious friend, and of more
than that: for once in a way, I was actually treading the same boards
with him.

I think he thoroughly enjoyed what was to him an unknown experience, a
ten days' rest; but I doubt whether he took it as a holiday; he had
books and papers to keep him company that looked suspiciously like
business, and when he reclined full length on his steamer-chair,
contemplating the rolling sea through his eye-glasses, he looked as if
he were meditating a revival of "The Tempest," and consulting with
Neptune and AEolus as to the best way of producing it.

As for Ellen Terry, she was _facile princeps_ on our floating city,
fascinating everybody, from captain and crew, _via_ first and second
class passengers, down to the emigrant's crowing baby. There had been a
grand gathering to see her and Irving off. Friends had come, laden with
parting gifts; golden-haired children were there, bringing baskets