One of our English summers looks, in the retrospect, as if it had been patched with more frequent sunshine than the sky of England ordinarily affords; but I believe that it may be only a moral effect,—­a “light that never was on sea nor land,”—­caused by our having found a particularly delightful abode in the neighborhood of London.  In order to enjoy it, however, I was compelled to solve the problem of living in two places at once,—­an impossibility which I so far accomplished as to vanish, at frequent intervals, out of men’s sight and knowledge on one side of England, and take my place in a circle of familiar faces on the other, so quietly that I seemed to have been there all along.  It was the easier to get accustomed to our new residence, because it was not only rich in all the material properties of a home, but had also the home-like atmosphere, the household element, which is of too intangible a character to be let even with the most thoroughly furnished lodging-house.  A friend had given us his suburban residence, with all its conveniences, elegancies, and snuggeries,—­its drawing-rooms and library, still warm and bright with the recollection of the genial presences that we had known there,—­its closets, chambers, kitchen, and even its wine-cellar, if we could have availed ourselves of so dear and delicate a trust,—­its lawn and cozy garden-nooks, and whatever else makes up the multitudinous idea of an English home,—­he had transferred it all to us, pilgrims and dusty wayfarers, that we might rest and take our case during his summer’s absence on the Continent.  We had long been dwelling in tents, as it were, and morally shivering by hearths which, heap the bituminous coal upon them as we might, no blaze could render cheerful.  I remember, to this day, the dreary feeling with which I sat by our first English fireside, and watched the chill and rainy twilight of an autumn day darkening down upon the garden; while the portrait of the preceding occupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable personage in his lifetime) scowled inhospitably from above the mantel-piece, as if indignant that an American should try to make himself at home there.  Possibly it may appease his sulky shade to know that I quitted his abode as much a stranger as I entered it.  But now, at last, we were in a genuine British home, where refined and warm-hearted people had just been living their daily life, and had left us a summer’s inheritance of slowly ripened days, such as a stranger’s hasty opportunities so seldom permit him to enjoy.

Within so trifling a distance of the central spot of all the world, (which, as Americans have at present no centre of their own, we may allow to be somewhere in the vicinity, we will say, of St. Paul’s Cathedral,) it might have seemed natural that I should be tossed about by the turbulence of the vast London-whirlpool.  But I had drifted into a still eddy, where conflicting movements made a repose, and, wearied with a good