I answered:  “Tell them I never loved ’em so much as now,” and burst into tears!  No wonder that he wrote in his paper that I was “a woman of extreme nervous sensibility.”  Another of them said that “my figure was spare almost to attenuation.”  America soon remedied that.  I began to put on flesh before I had been in the country a week, and it was during my fifth American tour that I became really fat for the first time in my life.

When we landed I drove to the Hotel Dam, Henry to the Brevoort House.  There was no Diana on the top of the Madison Square Building then.  The building did not exist, to cheer the heart of a new arrival as the first evidence of beauty in the city.  There were horse trams instead of cable cars, but a quarter of a century has not altered the peculiarly dilapidated carriages in which one drives from the dock, the muddy side-walks, and the cavernous holes in the cobble-paved streets.  Had the elevated railway, the first sign of power that one notices after leaving the boat, begun to thunder through the streets?  I cannot remember New York without it.

I missed then, as I miss now, the numberless hansoms of London plying in the streets for hire.  People in New York get about in the cars, unless they have their own carriages.  The hired carriage has no reason for existing, and when it does, it celebrates its unique position by charging two dollars (8_s._) for a journey which in London would not cost fifty cents (2_s._)!

I cried for two hours at the Hotel Dam!  Then my companion, Miss Harries, came bustling in with:  “Never mind! here’s a piano!” and sat down and played “Annie Laurie” very badly until I screamed with laughter.  Before the evening came my room was like a bower of roses, and my dear friends in America have been throwing bouquets at me in the same lavish way ever since.  I had quite cheered up when Henry came to take me to see some minstrels who were performing at the Star Theater, the very theater where in a few days we were to open.  I didn’t understand many of the jokes which the American comedians made that night, but I liked their dry, cool way of making them.  They did not “hand a lemon” or “skiddoo” in those days; American slang changes as quickly as thieves’ slang, and only “Gee!” and “Gee-whiz!” seem to be permanent.

There were very few theaters in New York when we first went there.  All that part of the city which is now “up town” did not exist, and what was then “up” is now more than “down” town.  The American stage has changed almost as much.  In those days their most distinguished actors were playing Shakespeare or old comedy, and their new plays were chiefly “imported” goods.  Even then there was a liking for local plays which showed the peculiarities of the different States, but they were more violent and crude than now.  The original American genius and the true dramatic pleasure of the people is, I believe, in such plays, where very complete observation of certain phases of American life and very real pictures of manners are combined with comedy almost childlike in its naivete.  The sovereignty of the young girl which is such a marked feature in social life is reflected in American plays.