It was a very rich experience for a single day:  the stately abode of royalty, with all its manifold historical recollections, the magnificent avenue of forest trees, the old oaks, the hawthorn in full bloom, and the one cry of the cuckoo, calling me back to Nature in her spring-time freshness and glory; then, after that, a great London dinner-party at a house where the kind host and the gracious hostess made us feel at home, and where we could meet the highest people in the land,—­the people whom we who live in a simpler way at home are naturally pleased to be with under such auspices.  What of all this shall I remember longest?  Let me not seem ungrateful to my friends who planned the excursion for us, or to those who asked us to the brilliant evening entertainment, but I feel as Wordsworth felt about the cuckoo,—­he will survive all the other memories.

  “And I can listen to thee yet,
     Can lie upon the plain
  And listen, till I do beget
     That golden time again.”

Nothing is more hackneyed than an American’s description of his feelings in the midst of the scenes and objects he has read of all his days, and is looking upon for the first time.  To each of us it appears in some respects in the same way, but with a difference for every individual.  We may smile at Irving’s emotions at the first sight of a distinguished Englishman on his own soil,—­the ingenious Mr. Roscoe, as an earlier generation would have called him.  Our tourists, who are constantly going forward and back between England and America, lose all sense of the special distinctions between the two countries which do not bear on their personal convenience.  Happy are those who go with unworn, unsatiated sensibilities from the New World to the Old; as happy, it may be, those who come from the Old World to the New, but of that I cannot form a judgment.

On the first day of June we called by appointment upon Mr. Peel, the Speaker of the House of Commons, and went through the Houses of Parliament.  We began with the train-bearer, then met the housekeeper, and presently were joined by Mr. Palgrave.  The “Golden Treasury” stands on my drawing-room table at home, and the name on its title-page had a familiar sound.  This gentleman is, I believe, a near relative of Professor Francis Turner Palgrave, its editor.

Among other things to which Mr. Palgrave called our attention was the death-warrant of Charles the First.  One name in the list of signers naturally fixed our eyes upon it.  It was that of John Dixwell.  A lineal descendant of the old regicide is very near to me by family connection, Colonel Dixwell having come to this country, married, and left a posterity, which has resumed the name, dropped for the sake of safety at the time when he, Goffe, and Whalley, were in concealment in various parts of New England.