“There’s a charm, a magic strange,
      Thus to recognise once more,
    Changeless in the midst of change
      Mind and spirit as of yore;
    Even face and form discerned
      Easily and greeted well,
    While our hearts together burned
      At school-tales we had to tell.

    “Mostly dead, forgotten, gone,—­
      Few old Railtonites of fame
    (Here and there we noted one),
      Yet we find ourselves the same! 
    Sons of either hemisphere
      We can never stand apart,
    With to me Columbia dear
      And my England in your heart.

    “You, of good old English stock,—­
      I—­some kindred of mine own
    Pound themselves on Plymouth Rock,
      Five times fifty years agone;
    So, I come at sixty-six,
      All across the Atlantic main,
    With my kith and kin to mix,
      And to greet you once again!”

I may here record that, accompanied by Middleton, I watched at an alligator’s hole with a rifle, but the beast would not come out, perhaps luckily for me, if I missed a stomach shot; that I was prevented from bringing down a carrion vulture, it being illegal to kill those useful scavengers; that I caught some dear little green tree frogs; that I noted how the rice-fields had become a poisonous marsh; that I noticed the extensive strata of guano and fossil bone pits, securing some large dragon’s teeth, and with them sundry flint arrow-heads, suggestive of man’s antiquity; that I lamented over the desolation of my friend’s mansion and estate, and in particular to have seen how outrageously the Federals had destroyed his family-mausoleum, scattering the sacred relics of his ancestors all round and about.  This was simply because he had been a Confederate magnate, and had owned patriarchally a multitude of slaves, born on the spot through two centuries.  He and his kind brother, the Admiral,—­my friendly host at Washington,—­have joined the majority elsewhere; but I heard from him and others down South the truth about American slavery.

For remainder rapid notice.  Paul Hayne the poet is remembered well; and the fine old great-grandmother with eighty-six descendants of my name; and thereafter came the inauguration of President Hayes, an account whereof I wrote to the English papers; and hospitalities at the White House, and records of plenty more Readings and receptions; and all about Edgar Poe at Baltimore, and my acquaintance with Henry Ward Beecher, and my final New York hospitalities, and my pamphlet “America Revisited,” written on board the return steamer the Batavia,—­and so an end hurriedly.

This was my last farewell to my million friends, published in Bryant’s paper;—­

    Valete!

    “A last Farewell—­O many friends! 
      I leave your love with saddened heart;
    And so my grateful spirit sends
      This answering love before we part: 
    I thank you tenderly each one,
      I praise your goodness, dear to tell,
    And, well-remembered when I’m gone,
      Alike will yearn on you as well.