In the morning it hailed, which afterward turned to rain, but in the afternoon there was only showers now and then, so that we spent most of the time on deck.  On this boat we met a very nice Englishman and his wife, and when they had heard us speak to each other they asked us if we had ever been in this part of the world before, and when we said we hadn’t they told us about the places we passed.  If we had been an English couple who had never been there before they wouldn’t have said a word to us.

As we got near the Clyde the gentleman began to talk about ship-building, and pretty soon I saw in his face plain symptoms that he was going to have an attack of comparison making.  I have seen so much of this disorder that I can nearly always tell when it is coming on a person.  In about a minute the disease broke out on him, and he began to talk about the differences between American and English ships.  He told Jone and me about a steamship that was built out in San Francisco which shook three thousand bolts out of herself on her first voyage.  It seemed to me that that was a good deal like a codfish shaking his bones out through swimming too fast.  I couldn’t help thinking that that steamship must have had a lot of bolts so as to have enough left to keep her from scattering herself over the bottom of the ocean.

I expected Jone to say something in behalf of his country’s ships, but he didn’t seem to pay much attention to the boat story, so I took up the cudgels myself, and I said to the gentleman that all nations, no matter how good they might be at ship-building, sometimes made mistakes, and then to make a good impression on him I whanged him over the head with the “Great Eastern,” and asked him if there ever was a vessel that was a greater failure than that.

He said, “Yes, yes, the ‘Great Eastern’ was not a success,” and then he stopped talking about ships.

When we got fairly into the Clyde and near Glasgow the scene was wonderful.  It was nearly night, and the great fires of the factories lit up the sky, and we saw on the stocks a great ship being built.

We stayed in Glasgow one day, and Jone was delighted with it, because he said it was like an American city.  Now, on principle, I like American cities, but I didn’t come to Scotland to see them; and the greatest pleasure I had in Glasgow was standing with a tumbler of water in my hand, repeating to myself as much of the “Lady of the Lake” as I could remember.

Letter Number Twenty-five

LONDON

Here we are in this wonderful town, where, if you can’t see everything you want to see, you can generally see a sample of it, even if your fad happens to be the ancientnesses of Egypt.  We are at the Babylon Hotel, where we shall stay until it is time to start for Southampton, where we shall take the steamer for home.  What we are going to do between here and Southampton I don’t know yet; but I do know that Jone is all on fire with joy because he thinks his journeys are nearly over, and I am chilled with grief when I think that my journeys are nearly over.