united itself with a great variety of other impressions which
made the first month of travel altogether the rapidest school of
education he had yet found. The stride in knowledge seemed
gigantic. One began a to see that a great many impressions were
needed to make very little education, but how many could be
crowded into one day without making any education at all, became
the pons asinorum of tourist mathematics. How many would turn out
to be wrong whether any could turn out right, was ultimate
wisdom.

The ocean, the Persia, Captain Judkins, and Mr. G. P. R. James,
the most distinguished passenger, vanished one Sunday morning in
a furious gale in the Mersey, to make place for the drearier
picture of a Liverpool street as seen from the Adelphi
coffee-room in November murk, followed instantly by the
passionate delights of Chester and the romance of red-sandstone
architecture. Millions of Americans have felt this succession of
emotions. Possibly very young and ingenuous tourists feel them
still, but in days before tourists, when the romance was a
reality, not a picture, they were overwhelming. When the boys
went out to Eaton Hall, they were awed, as Thackeray or Dickens
would have felt in the presence of a Duke. The very name of
Grosvenor struck a note of grandeur. The long suite of lofty,
gilded rooms with their gilded furniture; the portraits; the
terraces; the gardens, the landscape; the sense of superiority in
the England of the fifties, actually set the rich nobleman apart,
above Americans and shopkeepers. Aristocracy was real. So was the
England of Dickens. Oliver Twist and Little Nell lurked in every
churchyard shadow, not as shadow but alive. Even Charles the
First was not very shadowy, standing on the tower to see his army