circle, and apart from the deep, comfortable glow experienced at the
first sight of the "old country," I found England and the English
dull, conventional, and uninspired. There was no poignancy. The
habits and the outlook stood precisely where I had left them. The
English had not moved. They played golf as of yore, they went to the
races at the appointed time and in the appointed garb, they gave
heavy dinner-parties, they wrote letters to the Times, and ignored an
outside world beyond their island. Their estimate of themselves and
of foreigners remained unaltered, their estimate of rich or
influential neighbours was what it always had been, there were many
more motor-cars and a few more peers, it was more difficult than
formerly to get into a good club; but otherwise, God bless them, they
were worthier than ever. The "dear old country," that which "out
there" we had loved and venerated, worked and fought for, was stolid
and unshaken; the stream of advancing life that elsewhere rushed, had
left England complaisantly unmoved and unresponsive.

You have no idea how vividly--and in what curious minor details--the
general note of England strikes a traveller returning after an
interval of years. Later, of course, the single impression is
modified and obscured by other feelings. I give it, therefore, before
it was forgotten. England had not budged. Had it been winter instead
of early spring, I might sum up for you what I mean in one short
sentence: I travelled to London in a third-class railway carriage
that had no heating apparatus.

But to all this, and with a touch of something akin to pride in me, I
speedily adjusted myself. I had been exiled, I had come home. As our
old nurse, aged and withered, but otherwise unaltered, said to me
quietly by way of greeting: "Well, they didn't kill you, Master