Rural England with its moss-grown farmhouses, its gray steeples, its white cottages clustering under their shadow, its tiny fields, its green hedgerows, garrisoned by the mighty elms, charmed Mary Anderson beyond expression, contrasting so strongly with the vast prairies, the primeval forests, the mighty rivers of her own giant land.  These were the boundaries of her horizon in the earlier months of her stay among us; she knew little but the England of the past, and the England as the stranger sees it, who passes on his travels through its smiling landscapes.  But a change of residence to Kensington brought Mary Anderson more within reach of those whom she had so charmed upon the stage, and who longed to have the opportunity of knowing her personally.  By degrees her drawing-rooms became the scene of an informal Sunday afternoon reception.  Artists and novelists, poets and sculptors, statesmen and divines, journalists and people of fashion crowded to see her, and came away wondering at the skill and power with which this young girl, evidently fresh to society, could hold her own, and converse fluently and intelligently on almost any subject.  If the verdict of London society was that Mary Anderson was as clever in the drawing-room as she was attractive on the stage, she, in her turn, was charmed to speak face to face with many whose names and whose works had long been familiar to her.  It was a new world of art and intellect and genius to which she was suddenly introduced, and which seemed to her all the more brilliant after the somewhat prosaic uniformity of society in her own republican land.  To say that she admires and loves England with all her heart may be safely asserted.  To say that it has almost succeeded in stealing away her heart from the land of her birth, she would hardly like to hear said.  But we think her mind is somewhat that of Captain Macheath, in the “Beggars’ Opera”—­

  “How happy could I be with either,
  Were t’other dear charmer away.”

One superiority, at least, she confesses England to have over America.  The dreadful “interviewer” who has haunted her steps for the last eight years of her life with a dogged pertinacity which would take no denial, was here nowhere to be seen.  He exists we know, but she failed to recognize the same genus in the quite harmless-looking gentleman, who, occasionally on the stage after a performance, or in her drawing-room, engaged her in conversation, when leading questions were skillfully disguised; and, then, much to her astonishment, afterward produced a picture of her in print with materials she was quite unconscious of having furnished.  She failed, she admits now, to see the conventional “note-book,” so symbolical of the calling at home, and thus her fears and suspicions were disarmed.