At divers
places on the way, after we left London, he pointed out some
scene associated with American saints or heroes. We traversed the
region that George William Curtis' people came from, hard by
Roxburgh, and Eliot's, the Apostle to the Indians; again we
skirted the Ralph Waldo Emerson country, with its big market town
of Bishop's Stortford; and beyond Ely, where we stopped for the
Cathedral and a luncheon, not unworthy of it, at the station, he
startled me from a pleasant drowse I had fallen into in our
railway carriage, with the cry: "There! That is where Captain
John Smith was born." "Where? Where?" I implored too late,
looking round the compartment everywhere. "Back where those
chickens were."
I
That was the nearest I came to seeing one of the most famous
Virginian origins. But you cannot see everything in England;
there are too many things; and if the truth must be known I cared
more for the natural features than the historical facts of the
landscape. The country was flat, and a raw green, as it should be
in that raw air, under that dun sky, with sheep hardily biting
the short tough pasturage under the imbrowning oaks and elms, and
the olive-graying willows, beside the full, still streams scarce
wetter than the ground they dreamed through.
Pages:
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133