the renowned Bend Or, a Derby winner, a noble and beautiful bay,
destined in a few weeks to gain new honors on the same turf in the
triumph of his offspring Ormonde, whose acquaintance we shall make
by-and-by.

The next day, Tuesday, May 11th, at 4.25, we took the train for London.
We had a saloon car, which had been thoughtfully secured for us through
unseen, not unsuspected, agencies, which had also beautified the
compartment with flowers.

Here are some of my first impressions of England as seen from the
carriage and from the cars.--How very English! I recall Birket Foster's
Pictures of English Landscape,--a beautiful, poetical series of views,
but hardly more poetical than the reality. How thoroughly England _is
groomed_! Our New England out-of-doors landscape often looks as if it
had just got out of bed, and had not finished its toilet. The glowing
green of everything strikes me: green hedges in place of our
rail-fences, always ugly, and our rude stone-walls, which are not
wanting in a certain look of fitness approaching to comeliness, and are
really picturesque when lichen-coated, but poor features of landscape as
compared to these universal hedges. I am disappointed in the trees, so
far; I have not seen one large tree as yet. Most of those I see are of
very moderate dimensions, feathered all the way up their long slender
trunks, with a lop-sided mop of leaves at the top, like a wig which has
slipped awry. I trust that I am not finding everything _couleur de
rose_; but I certainly do find the cheeks of children and young
persons of such brilliant rosy hue as I do not remember that I have ever
seen before. I am almost ready to think this and that child's face has
been colored from a pink saucer. If the Saxon youth exposed for sale at
Rome, in the days of Pope Gregory the Great, had complexions like these