[Illustration: ST. GEORGE'S HALL, LIVERPOOL]

The place was a little America which swelled into a larger with
the arrivals of the successive steamers, though the soft swift
English trains bore our co-nationals away as rapidly as they
could. Many familiar accents remained till the morning, and the
breakfast-room was full of a nasal resonance which would have
made one at home anywhere in our East or West. I, who was then
vainly trying to be English, escaped to the congenial top of the
farthest bound tram, and flew, at the rate of four miles an hour,
to the uttermost suburbs of Liverpool, whither no rumor of my
native speech could penetrate. It was some balm to my wounded
pride of country to note how pale and small the average type of
the local people was. The poorer classes swarmed along a great
part of the tram-line in side streets of a hard, stony look, and
what characterized itself to me as a sort of iron squalor seemed
to prevail. You cannot anywhere have great prosperity without
great adversity, just as you cannot have day without night, and
the more Liverpool evidently flourished the more it plainly
languished. I found no pleasure in the paradox, and I was not
overjoyed by the inevitable ugliness of the brick villas of the
suburbs into which these obdurate streets decayed. But then,
after divers tram changes, came the consolation of beautiful
riverside beaches, thronged with people who looked gay at that
distance, and beyond the Mersey rose the Welsh hills, blue, blue.


III

At the end of the tram-line, where we necessarily dismounted, we