it attacked them unmercifully and without cause in the midst of their
honeymoon. Girl students, whose sole aim in life has been to come
abroad to study, and who, in finally coming, have fondly dreamed that
the gates of Paradise had swung open before their delighted eyes, have
been among its earliest and most acutely afflicted victims. No
success, no realized ambitions ward it off. Like death, it comes to
high and low alike. One woman, whose name became famous with her first
concert, told me that she spent the first year over here in tears.
Nothing that friends can do, no amount of kindness or hospitality
avails as a preventive. You can take bromides and cure insomnia. You
can take chloroform, and enough of it will prevent seasickness, but
nothing avails for _Heimweh_. And like pride, "let him that thinketh
he standeth take heed lest he fall." I have been in the midst of an
animated, recital of how homesick I had been the day before,
ridiculing myself and my malady with unctuous freedom, when suddenly
Billy's little face would seem to rise out of the flowers on the
dinner-table, or the patter of his little flying feet as they used to
sound in my ear as he fluttered down the long hall to my study, or the
darling way he used to ran towards me when I held out my arms and
said, "Come, Billy, let Tattah show you the doves," with such an
expectant face, and that little scarlet mouth opened to kiss me--oh,
it is nothing to anybody else, but it is home to me, and I was only
recalled to London and my dinner party when a fresh attack was made on
America, and I was called once more to battle for my country.

I have "fought, bled, and died" for home and country more times than I
can count since I have been here. I ought to come home with honorable
scars and the rank of field-marshal, at least. I never knew how many
objectionable features America presented to Englishmen until I became
their guest and broke bread at their tables. I cannot eat very much at