This boy sat where he could—­in a crowded household it is not always possible to get a quiet corner; wherever he sat, this stage rose up before him and the play went on.  He saw upon that stage all these things of which I have spoken, and more.  He saw the fight at Nombre de Dios, the capture of the rich galleon, the sacking of Maracaibo.  I do not know whether other boys of that time were reading the American authors with such avidity, or whether it was by some chance that these books were thrown in his way.  Washington Irving, Fenimore Cooper, Prescott, Emerson (in parts), Longfellow, Whittier, Bryant, Edgar Allan Poe, Lowell, Holmes, not to mention Thoreau, Herman Melville, Dana, certain religious novelists and many others whose names I do not recall, formed a tolerably large field of American reading for an English boy—­without prejudice, be it understood, to the writers of his own country.  To him the country of the American writers became almost as well known as his own.  One thing alone he could not read.  When he came to the War of Independence, he closed the book and ordered his theatre to vanish.  And, to this day, the events of that war are only partly known to him.  No boy who is jealous for his country will read, except upon compulsion, the story of a war which was begun in stupidity, carried on with incompetence, and concluded with humiliation.

The attack on Panama, the beginning of the Colonies, the exiles for religion, the long struggle with the French, the driving back of the Indians:  it was a very fine drama—­the Romance of America—­in ever so many acts, and twice as many tableaux, that this boy saw.  And always on the stage, now like Drake, now like Raleigh, now like Miles Standish, now like Captain John Smith, he saw a young Englishman, performing prodigies of valour and bearing a charmed life.  Yet, do not think that it was a play with nothing but fighting in it.  There were the Dutch burghers of New Amsterdam, under Walter the Doubter, or the renowned Peter Stuyvesant; there was Rip Van Winkle on the Catskill Mountains; there were the king-killers, hiding in the rocks beside Newhaven; there were the witch trials of Salem; there was the peaceful village of Concord, from which came voices that echoed round and round the world; there was the Lake, lying still and silent, ringed by its woods, where the solitary student of Nature loved to sit and watch and meditate.  Hundreds of things, too many to mention, were acted on that boy’s imaginary stage and lived in his brain as much as if he had himself played a part in them.

As that boy grew up, the memory of this long pageant survived; there fell upon him the desire to see some of the places; such a desire, if it is not gratified, dies away into a feeble spark—­but it can always be blown again into a flame.  This year the chance came to the boy, now a graybeard, to see these places; and the spark flared up again, into a bright, consuming flame.

I have seen my Land of Romance; I have travelled for a few weeks among the New England places, and, with a sigh of satisfaction and relief, I say with Kingsley:  ‘At Last!’