rejected a thatched cottage, offering us tea, because we thought
it too thatched and too cottage to be quite true (though I do not
now say that there were vermin in the straw roof), and accepted
the hospitality of a pastry-cook's shop. We felt the more at home
with the kind woman who kept it because she had a brother at
Chicago in the employ of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, and had
once been in Stratford-on-Avon; this doubly satisfied us as
cultivated Americans. She had a Welsh name, and she testified to
a great prevalence of Welsh and Irish in the population of
Liverpool; besides, she sent us to a church of the Crusaders at
Little Crosby, and it was no fault of hers that we did not find
it. We found one of the many old crosses for which Little Crosby
is named, and this was quite as much as we merited. It stood at
the intersection of the streets in what seemed the fragment of a
village, not yet lost in the vast maw of the city, and it calmed
all the simple neighborhood, so that we sat down at its foot and
rested a long, long minute till the tram came by and took us back
into the loud, hard heart of Liverpool.

I do not mean to blame it, for it was no louder or harder than
the hearts of other big towns, and it had some alleviation from
the many young couples who were out together half-holidaying in
the unusually pleasant Saturday weather. I wish their complexions
had been better, but you cannot have South-of-England color if
you live as far north as Liverpool, and all the world knows what
the American color is. The young couples abounded in the Gallery
of Fine Arts, where they frankly looked at one another instead of
the pictures. The pictures might have been better, but then they
might have been worse (there being examples of Filippo Lippi,
Memmi, Holbein, and, above all, the _Dante's Dream_ of