meadows the elms seemed to droop like our own rather than to hold
themselves oakenly upright like the English; the cattle stood
about in the yellow buttercups, knee-deep, white American
daisies, and red clover, and among the sheep we had our choice of
shorn and unshorn; they were equally abundant. Some of the
blossomy May was left yet on the hawthorns, and over all the sky
hovered, with pale-white clouds in pale-blue spaces of air like
an inverted lake of bonnyclabber. We stopped the night at
Chester, and the next evening, in the full daylight of 7.40, we
pushed on to Liverpool, over lovely levels, with a ground swell
like that of Kansas plains, under a sunset drying its tears and
at last radiantly smiling.


II

The hotel in Liverpool swarmed and buzzed with busy and murmurous
American arrivals. One could hardly get at the office window, on
account of them, to plead for a room. A dense group of our
countrywomen were buying picture-postals of the rather suave
office-ladies, and helplessly fawning on them in the inept
confidences of American women with all persons in official or
servile attendance. "Let me stay here," one of them entreated,
"because there's such a draught at the other window. May I?" She
was a gentle child of forty-five or fifty; and I do not know
whether she was allowed to stay in the sheltered nook or not,
tender creature. As she was in every one else's way there,
possibly she was harshly driven into the flaw at the other
window.