After my return from the race we went to a large dinner at Mr. Phelps’s house, where we met Mr. Browning again, and the Lord Chancellor Herschell, among others.  Then to Mrs. Cyril Flower’s, one of the most sumptuous houses in London; and after that to Lady Rothschild’s, another of the private palaces, with ceilings lofty as firmaments, and walls that might have been copied from the New Jerusalem.  There was still another great and splendid reception at Lady Dalhousie’s, and a party at Mrs. Smith’s, but we were both tired enough to be willing to go home after what may be called a pretty good day’s work at enjoying ourselves.

We had been a fortnight in London, and were now inextricably entangled in the meshes of the golden web of London social life.

II.

The reader who glances over these papers, and, finding them too full of small details and the lesser personal matters which belong naturally to private correspondences, turns impatiently from them, has my entire sympathy and good-will.  He is not one of those for whom these pages are meant.  Having no particular interest in the writer or his affairs, he does not care for the history of “the migrations from the blue bed to the brown” and the many Mistress Quicklyisms of circumstantial narrative.  Yet all this may be pleasant reading to relatives and friends.

But I must not forget that a new generation of readers has come into being since I have been writing for the public, and that a new generation of aspiring and brilliant authors has grown into general recognition.  The dome of Boston State House, which is the centre of my little universe, was glittering in its fresh golden pellicle before I had reached the scriptural boundary of life.  It has lost its lustre now, and the years which have dulled its surface have whitened the dome of that fragile structure in which my consciousness holds the session of its faculties.  Time is not to be cheated.  It is easy to talk of perennial youth, and to toy with the flattering fictions which every ancient personage accepts as true so far as he himself is concerned, and laughs at as foolish talk when he hears them applied to others.  When, in my exulting immaturity, I wrote the lines not unknown to the reading public under the name of “The Last Leaf”, I spoke of the possibility that I myself might linger on the old bough until the buds and blossoms of a new spring were opening and spreading all around me.  I am not as yet the solitary survivor of my literary contemporaries, and, remembering who my few coevals are, it may well be hoped that I shall not be.  But I feel lonely, very lonely, in the pages through which I wander.  These are new names in the midst of which I find my own.  In another sense I am very far from alone.  I have daily assurances that I have a constituency of known and unknown personal friends, whose indulgence I have no need of asking.  I know there are readers enough who will be pleased