English Skies

WHEN Horace wrote that they who cross the sea change their skies, but not their natures, he uttered a truth the full meaning and force of which is too little regarded by those who are ready to find men of the same race differing essentially because they live in different countries. True, the sea that Horace meant was but the Adriatic, or at the most the Mediterranean. For it should always be remembered that to the ancients lakes were seas, and that “ the sea ” was the Mediterranean ; a voyage upon which to Greece, mostly within sight of land, was probably the poet’s only knowledge of those terrors of navigation, which, with denunciations of its inventor, he uttered in his ode on the departure of Virgil for Athens. The exclamation of the Psalmist, “ The floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their waves. The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea,”had probably its inspiration in a squall upon the shores of the Levant, or in a tempest in the tea-pot of Gennesareth. So little can we measure the occasion by the expression which it receives from a poet. He tells us not what the thing was. but what it seethed to him, what feeling it awoke in him; and what is really measured is his capacity of emotion and of its utterance, and even that is gauged by our capacity of apprehension and of sympathy. But what was true of a migration across the Adriatic, or the Ægean, or the Mediterranean, is equally true of one across the vast, storm-vexed Atlantic. Englishmen remain English, Frenchmen French, Germans German, and Irishmen Irish, even unto the third and the fourth generation. It is not lightly that I say this; not without long and careful consideration of the subject; not without knowledge of opinions received, too readily, to the contrary. That emigrants to this country or to any other find, in many cases, that a change in climate and in habits of life produces such changes in habit of body as may attract the attention, if not require the aid, of a physician may be true enough. This is not to the point in question. Let those of my Yankee readers who are really observant upon such subjects consider their acquaintances of French, of Highland Scotch, or of Dutch descent, or those of Irish and German descent, if they have any, and see whether to this day they do not show, both mentally and bodily, the distinctive traits of race, even if their blood has been under the influence of American skies for eight generations, — whether at this day there is in them any greater modification of race characteristics than might be reasonably expected if each one of these persons had been brought to this country in his own early youth.

The change of sky — I refer now to the visible heavens, and what is grandly called meteorology — made by passing from Old England to New England was very great. As, on my outward voyage, we neared land, and were on the lookout for the first sight of it, my attention was immediately attracted by the sky. Without the evidence of the ship’s log, it seemed to me that I should have had no doubt that near by us there was another land than that from which I had come: certainly, above us there was another heaven. It was in the afternoon of a fine summer day, and the outlook over the calm water was beautiful, with a radiance softly bright; but those were not the clouds of the skies that I had left behind me. There were three layers of them, and well there might have been; for the lowest were so low that it seemed as if our masts must tear them asunder if we should pass beneath them. But they were not heavy; on the contrary, they seemed to be of the lightest texture; and they stretched far away in long, low lines that could not yet be called bars, — not only were they so large, but their outlines were so soft and undefined. Clouds so formed — clouds which a meteorologist would probably pronounce to be of the same kind — I had seen above the bay of New York, and over the shores of Long Island and New England; but they were high, so high that distance made them small; their forms were sharply defined; and when the sun was above the horizon, as it was now, or sinking gradually below it, they blazed in red and gold, whereas these were softly lit with a mellow, grayish light. They seemed too unsubstantial to reflect the rays that fell upon them, and to need, and to absorb and retain as for their own use, all the light that the sun bestowed upon them.

Far above these soared others, brighter, silvery, and fleecy; and yet above the latter, but not apparently so far, were others, shaped in radiating curves. These layers, indeed, I had seen in American skies, sometimes moving in contrary motion; but the effect was not at all like that which now attracted my admiring attention. The difference appeared to be caused first by the lowness of the first layer, then by the great distance between this layer and the one next above it, and finally by the very perceptible and almost palpable nature of that vast intervening space. It was not mere space, mere distance. My sight seemed to pass through something that enabled me to measure this vast interval, and the distance appeared almost as easily definable as if the two layers of clouds had been scenes in a theatre. And indeed so it was; for even at that great height the atmosphere was filled with a continuous vapor, which, although so thin as to be imperceptible, was yet of consistence enough to modify the light from the setting sun as the rays passed through its immensity. The skyey intervals were not so impalpable, so colorless, and therefore so immeasurable as they are in America.

As we neared the land great headlands came to meet us, stepping out into the sea, and bearing sometimes these long, low clouds upon their fronts. The day was smiling, and it seemed a gigantic sort of welcome that under lowering skies might have been a more gigantic defiance. And then at once I felt as I never before had felt the significance of the first lines of that splendid stanza in the most splendid of modern lyrics, —

With my glass, I saw upon the Irish side one or two little buildings, which proved to be lookouts and places for beacons, built at the time of the expected Spanish invasion, and one of those round towers which are of such remote antiquity and mysterious purpose that the most learned and sagacious antiquaries have failed to evolve an accepted theory as to their origin. Thus, even long before I touched the shore, was I made to feel the difference which the powers of nature and the art of man had made between the land which I had left and the land to which I had come.

As the steamer went on, and we came within easy eye-sight of the land, the rocky height of the Irish coast impressed me, and the bright rich green of the surface of the country, as it stretched off into the distance. It seemed as if the island were a great stone set in the ocean, the top of which had been covered with a thin coating of green enamel. And soon we were near enough to see the waves dashing against the sides of these cliffs, which were so high that the ocean swell seemed but to plash playfully about their feet. And then I felt as I had never felt before the meaning of the lines, and saw as I had never seen before the scene of the lines, —

The position of the speaker I had imagined before, — upon a height looking down upon the sea ; but here it was before me; those, or such, were the heights and crags, and there below was the bay.

When, after leaving Queenstown, we were well up the Channel, we were at times near enough to the eastern shore to see the surpassing beauty of the country: green field and darker wood, villages, farmsteads, country-seats, churches, castles, so unintentionally disposed by the hands of man and of nature working together that what was chosen for convenience or made for use blended into a picture of enchanting variety. And here I saw constantly something, a little thing, that delighted my eye, and I may almost say gladdened my heart, — windmills. There was a gentle breeze blowing, and these faithful servants of man for ages past were working away with that cheerful diligence which always marks their labors, and has always made me respect and like and almost love them, and feel a kind of sympathy with the poor dumb, willing things when a calm reduced them to idleness, which yet after all was wellearned rest. In my boyhood, there were two in sight from the Battery, on the Long Island side of the bay, and they were not far from my father’s house; but the places where they stood are now covered by a howling wilderness of bricks and mortar, and the windmill seems to have disappeared from the land. At least, I have not seen one anywhere for twenty years and more; and with them the tidemill seems to have gone also. In England, although it is the country of coal and iron and the steam-engine, I found them more or less wherever I went, giving life to the landscape, and standing, like a link of development, between man and unmitigated nature.¹

Off Anglesea I made my first acquaintance with that limited knowledge of manifest things on the part of the Philistine Englishman of Great Britain to which I have referred before, and which seems to me one of his distinctive traits of character. My fellow-passengers were almost wholly Britons, and they had assumed as a matter of course that I was one of them. But there was one difference between us: they had all been travelers, and had crossed the ocean more than once, some of them many times, while this was my first approach to the shores to which they had often returned. As a knot of us stood looking over the larboard quarter, I saw a somewhat imposing structure set far out into the water. I waited to hear what would be said about it. Presently one of my companions observed it, and asked what it was. Then there was a little discussion; and to my surprise, I may say to my amazement, no one knew, or seemed able to conjecture, at what we were looking. After a little reserve, I said that it was Holyhead, —a suggestion which was received with favor, and then with acquiescence. Aow my knowledge was due to no sagacity or study; but to the fact that before the days of the electric telegraph and of fleets of commercial steamers, my father’s counting-house was in South Street, where the steep-roofed old building still stands, and that on Saturdays I was a frequent and not unwelcome visitor on board the ships that lay at the wharves before his windows. Over the companion-ways into the cabins I saw painted rows of little flags, with the legend “ Holyhead signals; ” and with a boy’s inquisitiveness I asked a captain what that meant. His answer I need hardly give. Those were the signals which each ship hoisted when she came in sight of Holyhead light-house and lookout station, whence the vessel was announced, by semaphore telegraph, in Liverpool. Therefore, knowing where I was in the Channel, it went without saying that that was Holyhead. But there was a little crowd of my British cousins, travelers and commercial persons, who had passed the place again and again, and who did not know what it was! I held my tongue; but, like a wiser animal than I am, I kept up a great thinking.

When I landed, one of the very few differences that I observed between the people whom I had left and those among whom I had come was a calmer and serener expression of -countenance. This in the descending scale of intelligence became a stolid look, the outward sign of mental sluggishness. But, higher or lower, in degree or in kind, there it was, — placidity instead of a look of intentness and anxiety. Now, to suppose that this difference is caused by less thoughtfulness, less real anxiety, less laboriousness, on the part of the Englishman is to draw a conclusion directly in face of the facts. The toil and struggle of life is harder in England than it is here: poor men are more driven by necessity ; rich men think more; among all classes, except the frivolous part of the aristocracy (not a large class), there is more mental strain, more real anxiety, than there is here, where all the material conditions of life are easier, and where there is less care for political and social matters. Why, then, this difference of look? I am inclined to think that it is due, in a great measure, to difference of climate, — not to such effect of climate upon organization as makes a difference in the physical man, but to a result of climate which is almost mechanical, and which operates directly upon each individual. Briefly, I think that an expression of anxiety is given to the “ American ” face by an effort to resist the irritating effect of our sun and wind. Watch the people as they pass you on a bright, windy day. and you will see that their brows are contracted, their eyes half closed, and their faces set to resist the glare of the sun and the flare of the wind; and besides, in winter they are stung with the cold, in summer scorched with the hent. For about three hundred days out of the three hundred and sixty-five they undergo this irritation, and brace themselves to meet it. Now, a scowling brow, half-closed eyes, and a set face unite to make an anxious, disturbed, struggling expression of countenance, whether the man is really anxious, disturbed, and struggling, or not. By the experience of years this look becomes more or less fixed in the majority of “ American ” faces.

In England, on the contrary, there is comparatively no glare of the sun, and little wind. The former assertion will be received without question by those who have been in both countries; but the latter may be doubted, and may be regarded as strange, coming from a man who before he had been on English land forty-eight hours was almost blown bodily off Chester walls, and came near being wrecked in the Mersey. In fact, there are not unfrequently in England wind storms of a severity which, if not

unknown, is of the greatest rarity in the United States or in Canada. We have records of such storms in England in the past; we read announcements of them at the present day. I had experience of one there more severe than any that I remember here, and heard little or nothing said about it. But in England, when a storm is over, the wind goes down. Here, on the contrary, our “ clearing up ” after a storm is effected by the setting in of a north west wind, against which it is at first toilsome to walk, and which continues to blow out of a cloudless sky for days, with a virulence quite diabolical. Because it does not rain or snow, people call the weather fine, and delude themselves with the notion that the wind is “bracing;” but nevertheless they go about with scowling brows, watery eyes, and set faces, as they brace themseleves up to endure it. On my return this wind met me nearly two hundred miles at sea. It was something the like of which I had not felt once while out of reach of American shores. The air was as clear as a diamond ; the sky was as blue as sapphire and as hard as steel; the moon, about fifty thousand miles higher than it was in England blazed with a cold, cheerless light; life seemed made up of bright points; and the wind blew from the northwest, not tempestuously or in gusts, but with a steady, overbearing persistence for which nothing in nature affords any simile: it is itself alone. I knew that I was near home. There is nothing of this kind in England. Not only did I not find it in my brief experience, but I never heard of it, nor of it is there any record. The absence of it there and the presence of it here may, I think, be reasonably regarded as a very important influence in the fashioning the facial habit of the people of the two countries. All the more does this seem probable because I have observed that “ Americans ” who reside in England for a few years generally lose, in a great measure, if not entirely, the look in question, and on their return to their own shores soon acquire it again. Of course there are numerous exceptions to these remarks in both countries.

To speak of the difference between the climate of England and the climate of the United States is as reasonable as it would be to speak of any difference between England, on the one hand, and Europe, Asia, or Africa, on the other. England is an isolated territory, — half an island, — and is about as large as the State of Virginia, or as the States of New York and New Jersey together; while the United States cover the greater third of a continent, and stretch from ocean to ocean, and almost from the arctic regions to the tropics. England may be properly compared only with such several parts of the United States as are homogeneous in soil and climate. The difference between the climates, or rather the atmospheric conditions, of Old England and of New England, for example, or of the Middle States, is of course due, very largely, to the greater dampness of the former. As we all know, there is very much more rain in England than there is in Massachusetts or in New York. Careful records of observations, extending through twenty - three years, show that rain falls in the valley of the Thames, on an average, one hundred and seventyeight days in the year; that is, on nearly one half of three hundred and sixty - five days. Contrary to general supposition, the wettest month is July; and the wettest season is autumn, and not winter, as is generally believed. Spring is the least wet, winter comes next in rainfall and fog, summer next, and autumn stands highest. In this respect, autumn is to winter as 7.4 to 5.8. But I found rain in England to be a very different thing from rain in New England or in New York. With us it rarely rains but it pours ; and excepting a few light showers in May, all our rain-falls are more or less floods from the sky, and are accompanied by storms, — storms of thunder and wind in summer, violent winds from the northeast in autumn and winter. This is so much the case that loose speakers among us, who are largely in the majority, say that it is storming, or that it is going to storm, when they mean merely that it is raining, or that it is going to rain; applying storm to a May shower as to a November gale. This is a marked Americanism in speech, and entirely unjustifiable. Now in England rain is a much milder dispensation of moisture. It will rain there steadily for hours together, a fine, softly-dropping rain, without wind enough to shake a rose-bush. Such rain is almost unknown in America. I have again and again observed our rains for purposes of comparison, and find that about five minutes is the longest duration of such fine, light rain as I have seen continue in England for five hours, without either much increase or much diminution, and without any appreciable wind. It was not until I observed this, and saw that it was common, that I fully appreciated Portia’s simile of mercy that

We in America have no such rain as Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote those lines.

Although the rain falls thus gently, the heavens are very black. The earth is darkened by a murky canopy. It is gloomier than it is with us even when we have one of our three days’ northeasters, or one of our blackest thunderstorms. The clouds are of a dirty, grimy black, and seem not to be mere condensing vapor. Looking at them, you would suppose that they would foul the houses, the streets, and the fields, instead of washing them. They made me feel as I never before had felt the propriety of Miranda’s description : —

“ The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking
pitch.”

Fully to understand what that means, one must wake up, as Shakespeare often had waked, to an autumn rain in London. The reason of this seemed to me that the clouds lie so low. With us, the clouds, even in a copious rain, are so high that the drops strike smartly as they come down, and we can look up to the vapory level from which they fall. But in England the rain comes only from a little distance above the tops of the trees and the houses. (I am speaking not only of showers, but of steady rains.) Even when it did not rain and was not foggy I have seen the tops of the not lofty pinnacles of Westminster Abbey hidden in mist, and from the Thames have seen a gold-lined cloud descend upon the Parliament houses, as if to cast a royal robe around the Victoria Tower.

The changes of the sky, too, are sudden, although without violence. You will wake to find a steadily falling rain. The heavens will be of an impenetrable dun color; or rather, there will be no heavens, the very earth seeming to be wrapped around with a cloud of thick darkness, distilling water. You will naturally think that such a thick and settled mass can be dispersed and changed only by some great commotion of the elements. As you look out — no pleasant occupation—at long intervals, your judgment is confirmed. There is the same steady distillation of water out of the same darkness. Something, a book, or a newspaper; or a thought of faces far away, absorbs your attention, and suddenly there is a gleam of light. You look up, and the clouds are breaking away, and before you can change your dress and get out the day is a beauty smiling through tears, and all the earth seems glad again. But you cannot count upon the continuance of this even for an hour. With us, it the wind changes and the clouds break, they are scattered, driven out of sight for days. Not so in England. Your bright sky there may be obscured in five minutes, and in less than five minutes more, if you are sensitive to dampness, you will need your umbrella. This is what is meant in English literature by the changeability of the climate; not such sudden passages from hot to cold and from cold to hot as those which we have to undergo. And this variability of the heavens brought up to me again, and made me understand as I had not understood before, a passage of Shakespeate' s, where, in King Henry VIII., the doomed Buckingham says, —

The passage at best is marred with the effects of the manifestly hasty composition of this play ; but the instant cloud darkening the clear sun is a simile — yet not a simile, for it is the glory of Shakespeare’s style that he rarely wrote in similes — that has an illustrative power in England which is given to it by no corresponding phenomenon in America.

My readers may possibly suppose that these passages which I have mentioned as being brought to mind by the changing skies of England are after-thoughts with me, perhaps curiously sought out for the purpose of giving interest to my descriptions. Not so. The fitness of thing to thought was so exact and incisive that the latter came to me instantly as I was observing the phenomenon which, without doubt, had as instantly suggested them to Shakespeare.

Rain is not looked upon in England, as it is with us, as a barrier to the open air, unless, as an Irishman might say, the open air is taken in a close carriage. Indeed, were it so looked upon, the English people more than any other would live an indoor life, instead of being the most open-air loving of all nations. For the extravagant joke about the English weather, that on a fine day it is like looking up a chimney, and on a foul day like looking down, is more than set off by the truth of Charles II. ’s sober saying, that the climate of England tempts a man more into the open air than any other. It is very rarely, I should think, that the weather in England is for many hours together so forbidding that a healthy man, not too dainty as to his dress, would be kept indoors, and lose by it invigorating exercise. It is not too warm in summer, nor too cold in winter; it is never too hot and dry, and, notwithstanding the frequent rains, it is very rarely too wet. The mean temperature of the year is about fifty degrees; the mean temperature of the hottest month, July, only sixty-three degrees; and it is only on very exceptional days, in very exceptional years, that the mercury rises above eighty degrees, or falls below twenty degrees, the mean temperature of the coldest month, January, being thirty-five degrees.² A comparison of these teinperatures with those which we are called upon to bear in our long summers and in our longer winters shows the advantage which the people of England have over us in respect to out-door exercise. We cannot walk, or ride, or hunt, or shoot as they do. During no small part of our year physical exertion in the open air is painful rather than pleasurable, injurious rather than beneficial. It is only in autumn that we can find health and enjoyment out-of-doors. Between the middle of September and the middle of December we may enjoy a mellow air and what is left of the verdure in our parched landscape; but then we strangely leave the country, whither we go in the blinding, blazing summer, when walking or driving, except in the evening, and often not then, is a fitting diversion only for salamanders.

It is not, however, only the men in England who are not kept within doors by rain from their business, or their pleasure, or their mere daily exercise. English ladies, as is generally known, take open-air exercise much more freely and regularly than women in the same condition of life in most other countries. But it is not so well known, I believe, how ready they are to brave the rain, or rather to take it quietly, without braving, as a little inconvenience not to be thought of within certain bounds. At first, I was surprised to see, both in London and in the country, women who were evidently persons at least of education and refinement walking about in rain, coming out into rain, which would have caused an “ American ” woman to house herself, or if caught in it, and not kept out by sheer necessity, to make for shelter and for home. And not unfrequently I saw them doing thus umbrellaless. In England umbrellas would seem to be a necessity of daily life; but, according to my observation, they are much more generally carried by men than by women. In walking through the Crescent in Regent Street on a wet morning, I have met half a dozen women, lady-like in appearance, exposing themselves, and what is more their bonnets, without protection to the fine, drizzling rain with an air of the utmost unconcern. I walked, one morning, from Canterbury to the neighboring village of Harbledown, some three miles, in a rain that, notwithstanding my umbrella, wet me pretty well from the hips down. On my way I met, or overtook, men, women, and children, but only one of them had an umbrella, and that one was — of all creatures — a butcher boy! Just at the edge of Canterbury — I cannot say the outskirts, for the towns in England do not have such ragged, draggled things as outskirts — I stopped at a little house to get a glass of milk (and good, rich milk it was, price one penny), led thereto by a sense of emptiness (for I was yet breakfastless), and by a small placard in the window announcing the sale of that fluid. It was sold to me by a middle-aged woman, lean, “ slabsided,” sharp-nosed, with a nasal, whining voice, who, looking out the window past her business card, said, by way of making herself agreeable, as I quaffed her liquid ware, “ Seems suthin like rain, sir! ” It was pouring so steadily, although not violently, that I had thought of turning back, and giving up Harbledown for that day; but this determined me, and put me on my mettle. If a poor wisp of womanhood like that could see in such a down-pour only something like rain, flinching would be a shame to my beard and my inches. I was struck, too. by the thorough Yankeeness of her phrase: it might have been uttered on the outskirts of Boston. This likeness, however, struck me among the country folk in Kent on other occasions, to which I shall refer hereafter. In Kent I rarely heard an h dropped, and never one superfluously added.

At a great house where I was visiting in Essex, it was agreed at luncheon that we should have a walk in the park that afternoon, because it was fine, and we had had a drive the day before, and were to have lawn-tennis the day after. Now the phrase “ it’s fine ” in England means merely that it is not actually raining at the time of speaking; but when the hour of our walk came the rain came also with it. Our party was composed of two ladies and three gentlemen, and I expected that it would be broken up, of course. Not at all. With the most matter-of-course air, the ladies, neither of them at all robust in figure or apparently in health, donned light water proof cloaks, and, taking each of us an umbrella, we soberly waded forth to our watery English walk. I hope the ladies enjoyed it, for they caused me to do so; and we saw some noble trees and pretty views in the park and from it. We met a small flock of geese, who did not hiss, but looking earnestly seemed to recognize us, and to be ready to extend to us the web-foot of fellowship. I observed that even the ladies did not put on overshoes, but trusted merely to stout, serviceable walking shoes ; and although we walked over grass I found that my feet were not wet. I had made a similar observation on my walk to Harbledown. Then my feet became damp, of course ; but although there was neither a plank nor an asphaltuna path by the roadside (one of which is commonly found in the more thickly inhabited rural districts in England), my strong walking shoes were not soiled above the sole. This I found to be the case again and again, so firm are the tightly graveled roads in England. The harmlessness of wet grass was a puzzle to me. I walked all over the lawns at Hampton Court one morning after a rain, led to do so by a companion who knew how things should be done (you always walk on grass in England, if you like to do so), and I neither felt nor saw upon my shoes any evidence of water. Under similar circumstances in the United States, they would have been wet through in five minutes. It need hardly be said, however, that even when there is not a storm or an unusual rain the usual fall on alternate days is often too heavy to admit of parties of pleasure. Our lawn-tennis had to be given up as an out-of-doors performance, although the lawn had been specially mowed for the occasion. But my hostess was not to be balked. We went into one of the drawing-rooms, and ourselves rolling the furniture out into the great hall, we stretched a rope across the room, hung copies of the Times over it to make a barrier, and had our game out; in which, by the way, the most points were scored by my lady herself and by a Fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford.

In the gardens of such houses, or sometimes Upon the walls, it is common to find sun-dials, relics of the past. Those upon the walls are very large, some of them being ten or twelve feet in diameter. They seem to have been as common as clocks, and to have been set up as a matter of course long after clocks were no rarities. But if, according to the pretty legend upon one of them, Horas non numero nisi Serenas, they were useless unless the sun shone, they must have been mere ornaments for much more than half the days in the year. For even when it does not rain in England the days are comparatively few in which the sun casts a shadow strong enough to mark the hour upon a dial. The noonmark on the kitchen window-sill of old New England farm-houses was almost always, once a day, a serviceable sign of the time; but a sun-dial in England must have always been little more useful than a chair to a cherub.

The low temperature of the country enables the people to bear the dampness, and even to find it conducive to health and enjoyment of life. " " Let it be cold,” said an Englishman to me, as we walked from his villa to the train through a chilling drizzle, “and I care little so long as it is damp.” And I found the combination, on the whole, wholesome and not unpleasant. But if England, with its damp atmosphere, were subject to our extremes of heat and cold, it would be almost uninhabitable: it would be as unhealthy in winter as Labrador, in summer as India. I was surprised to see the freedom with which doors were left open for the entrance of the chill, damp air, and by the unconsciousness of possible harm with which women of the lower classes in the country went about in cold mist, or even in rain, without bonnets or shawls. For as to myself, at times I found this chilly fog pierce to the very marrow of my bones, and make me long for the fire which was not always attainable. And when I did have it the comfort that it gave me was not so great as I expected it would be. Fire does not seem to be very warm in England. I never saw a really hot one.

It is this combination of cold and damp that makes the Englishman so capable of food and drink. Nothing is more impressive about him than his diligence in this respect. He never neglects an opportunity. A hearty breakfast at nine o’clock; a luncheon at half past one or two, at which there is a hot joint and cold bird pies, with wine and beer; at five o’clock tea, generally delicious souchong, with thin bread and butter; dinner at eight, serious business; sherry and biscuit or Sandwiches at eleven, as you take your bedroom candle. At home it would have killed me in a month; there I throve upon it mightily, and laid pounds avoirdupois upon my ribs, which I lost within a year after my return to the air of America, which so often makes one feel like desiccated codfish. There is no shirking whatever of this matter of eating and drinking. It is not regarded as in the least indelicate, or, in the old-fashioned phrase, “ ungenteel,” even for a lady to eat and drink anywhere at any time. I remarked this at a morning concert of the great triennial Birmingham musical festival. The concert began at eleven o’clock, and as the price of tickets was a pound (five dollars) it is to be supposed that every person of the thousands present in that great hall had breakfasted well about eight or nine o’clock; but yet when the first part was over, around me and everywhere within sight, even in the seats roped off for the nobility, luncheon bags were produced, and flasks; and men and women began to eat sandwiches and other wiches, and to drink sherry and water, or something else and water (but never the water without the something else), as if they feared that they would be famished before they could get home again. And very careful in this respect are they of the stranger within their gates. The last words that I heard from a very elegant woman, as I parted from her to take a railway journey of three or four hours, were a charge to the butler to see that I had some sandwiches. Needless caution! They had been prepared, and were produced to me in a faultless package, and put into my bag with gravity and unction. In due time I ate them, and with appetite, saying grace to myfair providence.

One effect of the climate of England (it must, I think, be the climate) is the mellowing of all sights, and particularly of all sounds. Life there seems softer, richer, sweeter, than it is with us. Bells do not clang so sharp and harsh upon the ear. True, they are not rung so much as they are with us. Even in London on Sunday their sound is not obtrusive. Indeed, the only bell sound in the great city of which I have a distinct memory is Big Ben’s delicious, mellow boom. In country walks on Sunday the distant chimes from the little antique spires or towers float to you like silver voices heard through the still air. Your own voice is hushed by them if you are with a companion, and you walk on in sweet and silent sadness. I shall never forget the gentle, soothing charm of the Bolney chime in Sussex, which, as the sun was leaving the weald to that long, delicious twilight through which day lapses into night in England, I heard in company with one whose sagacious lips, then hushed for a moment, are now silent forever. These English country chimes are very different from those that stun our ears from Broadway steeples. They are simple, and yet are not formless jangle; but the performers do not undertake to play opera airs affetuoso and con expressione with ropes and iron hammers upon hollow tons of metal.

At the Birmingham musical festival, I first remarked the effect of the climate upon sound. There was a large instrumental band, and a good one; and that it was well conducted need hardly be said, for the conductor was Sir Michael Costa. But in precision of attack, in perfection of crescendo and diminuendo, in the finish and the phrasing of the various salient passages as they were suecessively taken up by the different instruments, and in sonority I found the performance not at all equal to that of Mr. Thomas’s band, the drill of which was very superior. A dozen bars, however, had not been played before I was conscious of a sweet, rich quality of tone, particularly in the string band, which contrasted with the clear, hard brilliancy of the Thomas orchestra. This impressed me more and more as the performance went on, although my enjoyment was marred by the organ being not perfectly in tune with the band. Another superiority in Costa’s band attracted my attention: they accompanied much better than Thomas’s; with more feeling, sympathy, and intelligence. The singers could trust them and lean upon them. This was doubtless due in great part to Costa’s long experience as an operatic conductor, while, on the other hand, Thomas has always worked in instrumental music pure and simple; but I cannot doubt that it was due in part also to the feeling of the individual performers. As to the difference in the quality of the tone, I can find no other cause for that than the climate. Possibly, however, the English orchestras tune to the normal pitch (although it did not seem to me to be so), in which case some superiority in quality of tone would be accounted for; the high, so called and absurdly called, Philharmonic pitch being destructive of quality, which is sacrificed to a sharp sonority.

One little performance of Costa’s on this occasion was very interesting. My seat, although not too near, happened to be in such a position that I could see all his motions, and even his face. In a piece by Beethoven there was a little fugue, the rhythm and the intonation of which were both somewhat difficult. As the tenors entered with the subject they were unsteady, and speedily went into confusion. Ruin was imminent. But turning to Costa I saw him, little disturbed, merely increase the emphasis of his beat, while he himself took up the subject, and, looking eagerly at the tenors, sang it right out at them. They were soon whipped in, and the performance was not only saved, but was so good that its repetition was demanded by the president, the Marquis of Hertford (no applause being allowed); and on the repeat the tenors behaved handsomely in the presence of the enemy.

Whether I was favored by the English climate I do not know, but in addition to this soft, sweet charm which the air seemed to give to everything that was to be seen or heard, I found late autumn there as verdant and as variously beautiful as early summer is with us, and without the heat from which we suffer. In Sussex the gardens were all abloom, wild flowers in the woods, blackberries ripening in the hedges, the birds singing, and everything was fresh and fragrant. Among the birds, I observed the thrush and the robin-redbreast; the latter not that tawny-breasted variety of the singing thrush which is here called a robin, but a little bird about half as large, with a thin, pointed bill, a breast of crimson, and a note which is like a loud and prolonged chirrup. It would be charming if we could have this man-trusting little feathered fellow with us; but I fear that he could not bear our winters. In Warwickshire, I found roses blooming, — blooming in great masses half-way up the sides of a two-story cottage on the road from Stratford-on-Avon to Kenilworth; and this was in the very last days of October. True, I had only a few days before shivered through a rainy morning drive in Essex, when the chill dampness seemed to strike into my very heart; but on the whole I found myself under English skies healthy, happy, and the enjoyer of a succession of new delights, which yet seemed to me mine by birthright.

Richard Grant White.