passage between the bar-room and parlor. A yellow-haired Saxon
child, with bare legs and fair face, crawls out from some inner
hollow to the door, and impends dangerous on the sill, throwing
numerous scared backward glances over his shoulder. The parlor
is taken bodily out of old English novels, a direct descendant,
slightly furbished up and modernized, of the Village inn parlor
of Goldsmith,--homely, clean, and comfortless. A cotton tidy
over the rocking-chair bewrays, wrought into its crocheted
gorgeousness, the name of Uncle Tom. This I cannot stand.
Time may bring healing, but now the wound is still fresh. "O,
you did Uncle-Tom it famously," I hurl out, doubling my fist
at the British lion which glares at me from that cotton tidy.
"I remember those days. O yes! you were rampant on Uncle Tom.
You are a famous friend of Uncle Tom, with your Exeter Halls,
and your Lord Shaftesburys, and your Duchess of Sutherlands!
Cry your pretty eyes out over Uncle Tom, dear, tender-hearted
British women. Write appealing letters to your sisters over
the waters, affectionate, conscientious kindred; canonize your
saint, our sin, in tidies, and chair-covers, and Christmas
slippers,--we know how to take you now; we have found out what
all that is worth we can appraise your tears by the bottle--in
pounds, shillings, and pence." But the beer-men curtail my
harangue, so I shake my departing fist at the cowering lion,
and, leaving this British institution, proceed to investigate
another British institution,--the undaunted English army, in
its development in Fort Wellington. A wall shuts the world out
from those sacred premises; a stile lets the world in,--over
which stile we step and stand on the fort grounds. A party of
soldiers are making good cheer in a corner of the pasture,--
perhaps I ought to say parade-ground. As no sentinel accosts