of spring, and seemed to me very lovely; but my first glance at an English landscape made it all seem pale and flat.  We went up from New Haven to London in the morning, and feasted our eyes all the way.  The French foliage is thin, spindling, sparse; the grass is thin and light in color—­in contrast.  The English trees are massive, solid in substance and color; the grass is thick, and green as emerald; the turf is like the heaviest Wilton carpet.  The whole effect is that of vegetable luxuriance and solidity, as it were a tropical luxuriance, condensed and hardened by northern influences.  If my eyes remember well, the French landscapes are more like our own, in spring tone, at least; but the English are a revelation to us strangers of what green really is, and what grass and trees can be.  I had been told that we did well to see England before going to the Continent, for it would seem small and only pretty afterwards.  Well, leaving out Switzerland, I have seen nothing in that beauty which satisfies the eye and wins the heart to compare with England in spring.  When we annex it to our sprawling country which lies out-doors in so many climates, it will make a charming little retreat for us in May and June, a sort of garden of delight, whence we shall draw our May butter and our June roses.  It will only be necessary to put it under glass to make it pleasant the year round.

When we passed within the hanging smoke of London town, threading our way amid numberless railway tracks, sometimes over a road and sometimes under one, now burrowing into the ground, and now running along among the chimney-pots,—­when we came into the pale light and the thickening industry of a London day, we could but at once contrast Paris.  Unpleasant weather usually reduces places to an equality of disagreeableness.  But Paris, with its wide streets, light, handsome houses, gay windows and smiling little parks and fountains, keeps up a tolerably pleasant aspect, let the weather do its worst.  But London, with its low, dark, smutty brick houses and insignificant streets, settles down hopelessly into the dumps when the weather is bad.  Even with the sun doing its best on the eternal cloud of smoke, it is dingy and gloomy enough, and so dirty, after spick-span, shining Paris.  And there is a contrast in the matter of order and system; the lack of both in London is apparent.  You detect it in public places, in crowds, in the streets.  The “social evil” is bad enough in its demonstrations in Paris:  it is twice as offensive in London.  I have never seen a drunken woman in Paris:  I saw many of them in the daytime in London.  I saw men and women fight in the streets,—­a man kick and pound a woman; and nobody interfered.  There is a brutal streak in the Anglo-Saxon, I fear,—­a downright animal coarseness, that does not exhibit itself the other side of the Channel.  It is a proverb, that the London policemen are never at hand.  The stout fellows with their clubs look as if they