constitution to sustain.  It was necessary that the heat of the apartment should be kept at one hundred and twenty degrees!  There was a large number of women and girls, and a few men and boys working under this melting ordeal.  And one of the proprietors was at their head, in a rather summer dress, and with a seethed and crimson face beaded with hot perspiration.  It was a very delicate and important operation which he had not only to watch with his own eyes, but to work at with his own hands.  I was glad to learn that he was a staunch Protestant, and did not believe in purgatory; but those poor girls!—­could they be expected to hold to the same belief under such a test?

I was told that they could get up lace so cheap that the people of the town frequently cover their gooseberry bushes with it to keep off the insects.  Spider-webbing is a scarcely more gossamer-like fabric.  Sixteen square yards of this lace only weigh about an ounce!  If the negroes on one of the South Carolina Sea-island plantations could have been shut into that dressing-room for two whole minutes, with the mercury at 120 degrees, they would have rolled up the whites of their eyes in perfect amazement and made a rush for “Dixie” again.

From Nottingham I made an afternoon walk to Mansfield.  The weather was splendid and the country in all the glory of harvest.  On reaching Newstead Abbey, I found, to my regret, that the entree to the public had been closed by the new proprietor, one, I was told, of the manufacturing gentry of the Manchester school.  Not that he was less liberal and accommodating to sight-seers than his predecessors, but because he was making very extensive and costly improvements in the buildings and grounds.  I have seen nothing yet in England to compare, for ornate carving, with the new gate-way he is making to the park.  It is of the finest kind of arabesque work done in stone that much resembles the Caen.  This prevention barred me from even a distant view of the once famous residence of Lord Byron, as it could not be seen from the public road.

Within about three miles of Mansfield, I came to a turnpike gate,—­a neat, cozy, comfortable cottage, got up in the Gothic order.  I stopped to rest a moment, and noticing the good woman setting her tea-table, I invited myself to a seat at it, on the inn basis, and had a pleasant meal and chat with her and an under-gamekeeper of the Duke of Portland, who had come in a little before me.  The stories he told me about the extent of the Duke’s possessions were marvellous, more especially in reference to his game preserves.  I should think there must be a larger number of hares, rabbits and partridges on his estate than in the whole of New England.  As I sat engaged in conversation with the woman of the house and this accidental guest, an unmistakable American face met my eyes, as I raised them to the opposite wall.  It was the familiar face of a Bristol clock, made in the Connecticut village adjoining the one in which I was born.  It wore the same honest expression, which a great many ill-natured people, especially in our Southern States, have regarded as covering a dishonest and untruthful mind, or a bad memory of the hours.  Still it is the most ubiquitous Americanism in the world, and it is pleasant to see its face in so many cottages of laboring men from Land’s End to John O’Groat’s.